57 ms·

Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

• nrjames 8y ago
  Raleigh converted Fayetteville Street to pedestrian only back in 1977. It ended up killing all of the businesses there. https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/163829/ https://www.wral.com/news/local/story/163829/ The city reopened it to traffic, however, and "revitalized" the area, resulting in a booming downtown economy: https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-from-raleigh-nc-fayetteville-street-renaissance https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-... I love pedestrian districts in cities. Copenhagen comes to mind. However, pedestrian district plans need to be considered carefully, else they backfire.
  • hyperpape 8y ago
    True, though I don’t know if it would have the same effect today. There’s 5000 people living downtown today, which is very new. When I go downtown, I usually don’t park on Fayetteville, I usually park a few blocks away and walk.
    • ghaff 8y ago
      I don't know the history of the mall in Raleigh but I suspect at least part of the issue was that, at the time, downtown Raleigh probably wasn't a place a lot of people wanted to walk around. As you say, there are a lot more people (and companies) downtown today and more upscale restaurants, bars, etc. Though, even today, like a lot of smaller cities that have had something of a renaissance, most of the places the average upscale professional would want to walk to are in a fairly small area.
      • hyperpape 8y ago
        I wasn't alive in 1977, but in the 90s, the perception was that downtown was busy during the day, but a ghost town after 5:00 PM. I don't believe that particular area was particularly unsafe or unwelcoming, it's just that the only reason people were there was daytime business.
  • vbuwivbiu 8y ago
    1977
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      The area was closed to vehicular traffic in 1977. The article about possibly replacing the pedestrian mall is 1997. Construction began in 2005. The area reopened to vehicular and pedestrian traffic in mid 2006. The article about the results and other cities considering the same is 2007. All of which is in TFA[1] the person you're replying to linked [1] https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-from-raleigh-nc-fayetteville-street-renaissance https://www.metrojacksonville.com/article/2007-may-learning-... I'm not sure if it's what you intended but implying the whole thing is from 1977 is misleading.
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    My city did this with bike lanes. Most of the housing isn't within easily walk able distance from downtown and the city is where a lot of people from surrounding towns go to buy things. All the downtown businesses that weathered the recession got rewarded with all their customers decided to spend their money at the businesses a mile away that had readily available parking. Grade A city planning right there. /s
  • simonsarris 8y ago
    Church st in Burlington VT partially closed to cars starting in 1980 (based on Stroget in Copenhagen) and ongoing into 2005 with more and more blocks carved out for pedestrians only. It has been very successful. Why did it work, when Raleigh failed? What needs to be "considered carefully", exactly? (The large college nearby definitely helps in VT's case. But what else?) https://www.churchstmarketplace.com/ https://www.churchstmarketplace.com/ https://www.churchstmarketplace.com/about/history https://www.churchstmarketplace.com/about/history
    • peller 8y ago
      I don't know anything about the Raleigh project but some other thoughts on maybe why Church St works: - Burlington is the biggest city in VT, and being on Lake Champlain and relatively close to the best ski areas in the state, it attracts a lot of tourists year round - A ton of local businesses downtown, urban/residential neighborhoods are also very close - A fair amount of parking (multiple parking garages, nearby on-street parking and parking lots) - There's City Hall Park, and the town promotes the 'culture', e.g. allowing street vendors and performers, and with the recentish ban on smoking, it's pushed most of the bums into the alleys/side streets
    • munk-a 8y ago
      I'd attribute a large portion of church street's success to zoning policies, the city has kept that street focused on small business to avoid that common american experience of walking by a walmart for twenty minutes... the north end of the street was more sparse in terms of doorways and always was more empty, but the center and southern end were vibrant. So I think the key to trying to do this is to encourage small business to minimize the feet/door so that there is a reasonable variety of services available.
    • gascan 8y ago
      Just speculating, but looking at the photos from Fayetteville, it was totally car-scale. Sure, it was pedestrian-only, but just look at the pictures of the locale. Huge buildings, long distances, wide street. This is not the best example but the first to pop to mind- compare to Pearl Street Mall, in Boulder, which seems to be doing well: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0180565,-105.2792529,3a,75y,74.44h,82.61t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sYTsjWcvQHaMkDss9oaC4cQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DYTsjWcvQHaMkDss9oaC4cQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D167.73972%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0180565,-105.2792529,3a,75y,... Which, just skimming, looks to be laid out similar to Church Street.
  • miketuritzin 8y ago
    You could also make the argument that opening city centers to cars should be considered carefully, and that is also true. It just happens to be the current default almost everywhere.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  • davidw 8y ago
    The town I'm from, Eugene, Oregon, did this too. They later reopened it, but put in roads that let cars through, but very slowly. Seems to be a good compromise. Closing a road entirely is probably something you should do once you're at such a level of pedestrian traffic that the car lanes are impeding pedestrians, which isn't terribly common in US cities. However, making areas where people don't drive fast is absolutely a win.
    • andys627 8y ago
      Good compromise considering where we’re at in the us.
    • kristjansson 8y ago
      There’s something to be said for joint car/pedestrian spaces as a permanent situation. Pike St outside of Pike Place market and Hanover St in the North End of Boston come to mind. Both are nominally streets, and cars attempt to drive them, but the speeds are slow enough, and there are enough pedestrians that both are on relatively equal footing. Cars are cautious of the pedestrians, and pedestrians weave around the cars, everyone has their choice of mode of transport.
  • randcraw 8y ago
    Same thing happened in Kalamazoo, MI back about 1978. The city center closed part of the main street to cars when a four story enclosed mall of boutique stores was built. Within five years most of the mall and nearby stores were dying. This was partly due to the growth of a pair of large enclosed malls 5 miles away which sucked business elsewhere. But I think most of the problem was that shoppers don't wants to walk outdoors in the long Michigan Winter. They needed to somehow enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize peoples' exposure to the elements, but that wasn't in the budget.
    • rootusrootus 8y ago
      Heh, enclose the pedestrian piazza to minimize exposure to the weather, thereby creating what we usually call a 'shopping mall.' Ah the irony that would be.
  • mlinksva 8y ago
    Downtown pedestrian malls were tried in many US cities and mostly failed. They were an attempt to make downtown retail competitive with suburban mall retail, by the former emulating the latter, after the former was already failing. They only worked when other things were in place that made lots of people walking downtown utilitarian, like adjacent universities, tourist attractions, and dense connected residential. Few people wished to drive and park near downtown for a quasi-mall shopping experience, apparently. Lots has been written about this, but one overview: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/revisiting_pedestrian_malls_scmidt.pdf https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/revisiting_pedestrian_malls_scmi...
  • mschuetz 8y ago
    As a counter example, Vienna largely converted its second major shopping street, Mariahilfer Straße, to a mostly pedestrian + bike zone, with parts of it also shared space with cars, though they do not have priority over pedestrians. Gets very crowded during core shopping hours, so much that biking there is rather difficult. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Wien_07_Mariahilfer_Stra%C3%9Fe_Shopping_f.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Wien_07_... First one was Kärntner Straße / Graben, which is pedestrians only. https://www.streifzugmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/AMH_BBB-12.jpg https://www.streifzugmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/AM... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Vienna%2C_K%C3%A4rntner_Stra%C3%9Fe_-_panoramio_%28101%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/82/Vienna%2... I'm looking forward to more streets getting closed off to cars. Way too much space is reserved for cars already.
  • nedt 8y ago
    Actually you need people in the city to not depend on cars. Public transport, cycle lanes and a reason to stay in the city centre like good restaurants, cafes, some festivals. Just closing a street to cars might just make everyone drive around and miss it. Also don‘t let big shopping malls be build at the outside of the city with huge parking areas. Create parks instead.
  • kevstev 8y ago
    Contrary to that anecdote, Jersey City (across the Hudson river from Manhattan), created a no-car zone near one of its busier subway stops and what was once a dead-zone after 8pm is now an extremely vibrant place filled with bars, restaurants and shops. Proximity to mass transit and having density that already discourages driving helps.
    • notyourday 8y ago
      It has nothing to do with car free streets and everything to do with the Jersey City being on the other side from Manhattan with rents being 50% or lower than the rents in Manhattan and Jersey city being accessible by PATH.
      • kevstev 8y ago
        I don't think you understand. The mayor closed off a stretch of Newark Avenue, which leads right into the Grove St Path Station in late 2014. Prior to this, Newark Avenue was a strip of fairly grimy stores, a few restaurants, and some new promising places like Word Bookstore had been moving in since 2010 or so. Still, this was a pretty dead place at night. In 2008, I would go to one of the two bars there and it would be a literal ghost town, with stores boarded up with metal gates and such- it looked almost post-apocalyptic. It was a little better from 2011-2014, but still it was a quiet area at night. After the pedestrian plaza was put in, the amount of foot traffic increased ten fold, particularly during the day when it was a heavily traffic-ed street. This brought in a new wave of bars and restaurants to the area, and its now a destination on its own, filled with people nearly 24/7. In fact it has gotten so popular and become such a destination, the city is now trying to introduce ordinances to reduce noise at night. The change was instantaneous after the pedestrian plaza was put in place. People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify.
        • notyourday 8y ago
          > People seem to forget these days how much Jersey City was shit on up until 2011 or so. It was "jersey" and it was absolutely not a definite that it would gentrify. Bed-Stuy Bushwick Gowanus East New York Bronx Inwood
• fredley 8y ago
  Pedestrianisation works well in European cities, especially small ones. It's quite common here in the UK, often there are strict time limits on when delivieries can be made, e.g. 6-8am when barriers are open to let vehicles in and out. However this model just does not work in the US, outside of very few places. US cities are designed for cars, and without major redevelopment everything's just too far apart - even within the context of a single street - for this to make sense. If you had electric scooters or something though...
  • adrianN 8y ago
    Internalize the cost of parking, drop mandatory parking minimums and change zoning to allows for reasonable density. Wait a few decades and cities probably won't be as car centric as they are now.
  • betterunix2 8y ago
    It took major redevelopment for many US cities to become car-centric, so I am not seeing why we could not do another redevelopment to create pedestrian-friendly cities.
    • MrEfficiency 8y ago
      >so I am not seeing why we could not do another redevelopment to create pedestrian-friendly cities. We have 2 local cities that made themselves bike friendly. Property values are going up in that area. However, the people living there were already 10%ers. Its cool to see lots of bike lanes and walkers, but they also managed to price the people that cant afford cars out.
      • hannasanarion 8y ago
        The cycle of gentrification will change that. In 10, 20 years, a new neighborhood will be the hip place to be, all the rich propel will move there, and prices will drop. It'd be nice if the development could happen in the low-income areas from the beginning, but it's hot hopeless.
      • 8y ago
• montenegrohugo 8y ago
  This may be shocking to people with an American upbringing, but cars (especially privately owned ones) just do not make sense going forward. Cities get bigger and denser, and wasting a big % of land on parking spaces, roads, intersections and accepting a horrible air quality (that reduces citizen life spans and health quality) and noise pollution just does not make any sense anymore. Carse are effective in less dense regions, but in modern cities other solutions have to be found. Mass transit, biking lanes, electro-scooters, (elevated)-footpaths are the way to go. Maybe even electric ridesharing. But privately owned gasoline-guzzlers are an archaic solution to the transportation problem, and they are not effective in today's society. I know european cities are much more pedestrian friendly & that US cities in general are more oriented towards the car lifestyle, but as said previously, this needs to change. It is a big cultural and infrastructure change over a longer timespan, but it is achievable. Of course change always requires some sacrifice, and I imagine the car-drivers in above mentioned article must have been plenty pissed at the beginning. But they paved over the streets, made the inner city pedestrian only, and now they are better for it. Of course this is a very small town and these changes do not scale up as easily as one would like, and much more complex projects will have to be designed for bigger cities. But it is doable (see initiatives in e.g. Madrid, Munich & most of the netherlands) and "only" requires some long-term commitment. But we all know how good politicians are at that (what's global warming??). I want to finish this comment with a call to engage in democracy. Make your opinion heard, loudly, go to the voting polls, participate in your local council, actually engage in politics. Because if you do not, no significant change will be made any time soon.
  • TomMarius 8y ago
    On top of other issues, most of Europe also enjoys a 4-season year - meaning that a bike or scooter is safely and comfortably usable around half of a year, definitely not more.
    • pjc50 8y ago
      That's very subjective, quite a lot of people do that year round in a lot of European cities. Certainly it's viable in southern Europe where it rarely snows.
• rnatkins 8y ago
  >How can it be that private property – the car – occupies the public space? Regardless of what you think of this policy, this is the level of reasoning of a 14 year old.
  • boobsbr 8y ago
    How can it be that private property - the bicycle/the scooter - occupies the public space?
    • rnatkins 8y ago
      How can it be that private property - my own body - occupies the public space?
      • detritus 8y ago
        It only occupies a small ephemeral spot in spacetime. Try lying in a single space for hours or days on end in a city and see how far your clever countering gets you. I'm sure there's many a vagrant who would rebut your thesis.
      • dao- 8y ago
        I wouldn't think of my body as private property. Leaving that aside, the answer to your question is that everybody has a body, so we're not talking about the same kind of privilege that car owners have. Nor do bodies occupy the same amount of space. Last but not least, they don't easily kill other people as they cross their way.
        • jaclaz 8y ago
          >I wouldn't think of my body as private property. Which it is fine. But unless you are totally naked, your body (not your private property) is covered by your private property and/or carries it. It is clear that a car occupies a lot more space than your clothes and carry-on belongings, but as said earlier that is only quantitative and not qualitative. And cars don't kill people (yet), their drivers may.
• cf141q5325 8y ago
  >“The city is the perfect size for pedestrianisation,” says local architect Rogelio Carballo Soler. “You can cross the entire city in 25 minutes. This seems to be the key point why it works.
  • boobsbr 8y ago
    25 minutes on foot? It's more of a village than a city.
    • jcelerier 8y ago
      > 25 minutes on foot? It's more of a village than a city. you can walk from side to side of Paris in a tad more than one hour with a good rhythm, and two hours if you take it normally.
      • adrianN 8y ago
        Paris is ~10km across. The metropole region around it is much larger.
      • boobsbr 8y ago
        Considering Paris is roughly 10 km across North-South, that's about 12 min/km at an average human walking speed. So, this city is about 2 km across, which is very small, a village, considering smaller cities are more sparsely populated than an European metropolis.
        • mattmanser 8y ago
          You're really fixated on this village thing. Drop into street view in the city centre and have a look around. It's not a village.
        • ajuc 8y ago
          Depends on the country probably. In my country villages are very often https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_settlement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_settlement , going on for kilometers along some road, with farming land on both sides. Small to medium cities (< 100 000 people) are often very dense because they're mostly made out of commieblocks or old tenament houses. It's much easier to live without a car in a city. BTW: this village goes on for 20 km. It has 6000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawoja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawoja For comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo is the most densely populated city in Poland, it has about 50 000 people, and is about 3x5 km of low buildings. And still about 10% of the city is a forest :) Cars waste so much space that people are used to bloated cities.
• oriol16 8y ago
  What piques my interest is why on earth has Pontevedra a Citibank office
  • switch007 8y ago
    Must be an old photo: Citibank retail exited Europe in 2014 (Citibank España was sold to Banco Popular in 2014)
• jimmybot 8y ago
  If you're interested in "walking" around yourself, here's the streetview: https://goo.gl/maps/gxHkcvg4LWB2 https://goo.gl/maps/gxHkcvg4LWB2
• Proven 8y ago
  What about those for whom it is hell? Maybe in tomorrow's edition?
• village-idiot 8y ago
  If it weren’t for the massive culture shock and difficulty, I’d live in Munich. I love the quiet city center.
  • ofrzeta 8y ago
    There's actually only one street with no cars (Kaufinger Str.) and lots of traffic around on the Altstadtring and such. It's far from a city without cars, to the contrary. Also you'd need to be able to afford the rent.
• _Codemonkeyism 8y ago
  Working in the center of Berlin, I wish Berlin would do the same. There is a hospital near, and a constant load noise level from ambulances. Without cars, those could be much much quieter, but traffic increased, cars got more soundproof and people hear loud music, so ambulances became loader all the time. Noise kills people.
• freediver 8y ago
  First thing I noticed when moved to SF Bay Area from Europe was “God, Los Gatos would be so beautiful if the main street was a pedestrian area.” Then went actively searching for one and found a little stretch at Santana Row in San Jose, if you can call 30 meters of blocked off street pedestrian area. But even dense populated cities like SF dont have a pedestrian zone. It is one of the rare things I miss quality of life wise.
  • mymythisisthis 8y ago
    I agree. I think that there is a transition point where slow moving cars and people can intermingle. A third option, a hybrid.
• TomK32 8y ago
  In my city, Linz in Austria, only a small part is pedestrian, and even then the main-line of the 4 (actually 2+2) tram lines is cutting right through it. I wish they'd extend the pedestrian area and add that second tram line overground rather than underground as the current political fantasies look like. Anyways, from that article, if you have a change in a city's government, change is a lot more likely to happen. If only there were some time-limitations on mayor posts and the council.
• Tade0 8y ago
  Population: 82.5k - obviously cars have no business driving through such a place. I spend a good chunk of the year in Bologna, Italy. The city centre there is a roughly ~4km^2 Zona Traffico Limitato - an area in which only certain vehicles are allowed during certain hours. Pretty much every city in Italy has such a zone and 4km^2 to me seems to be the ideal size for it. That being said I know a few people who live in the centre and judging by their experiences, I wouldn't want to move there. It's so densely packed that noise bounces off the walls effectively amplifying itself. Also there are no residential waste bins so if you miss trash day during the summer your organic waste turns into an unholy bag of stink. Walkable cities are a nice concept, but one has to watch out for one perverse incentive that is created along the way: pack everything as densely as possible.
• dathinab 8y ago
  I thing "banning" cars in a Town/City work well for smaller cities, through you still might want to have some time frame in which e.g. trucks can bring new goods to super markets, fire fighter etc. For larger cities I think it would still be possible to have many "no-car" isles, paired with good public transportation available for anyone at "any" place (which can be done today by e.g. using this small and _slow_ self-driving mini buses to connect the home/side streets with the underground trains, regular trains and potentially normal sized buses, you just need to deploy enough of them with a good rout planing algorithm and a smartphone app, through it might be slightly expensive).
  • eloycoto 8y ago
    Hi, Van and trucks can enter the city the first time in the morning, so things are ok, and there are no problems for that. The city itself is a "round island", so cars can go close to the estuary and be close to the city, so get into city center takes less than 15 minutes.
    • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      >and there are no problems for that. Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt. For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from ideal. Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$). I guess if the only industries in your city are white collar or tourism it's fine. Better to just not allow noncommercial vehicles during certain times.
      • eloycoto 8y ago
        >Forcing all deliveries to happen in the early morning sounds like a massive pain in the butt. >For example: Forcing a lunch/dinner restaurant to have people there early to deal with inventory or delivering inventory to a diner during breakfast rush are both far from idea TBH,restaurants the most happier with this changes. More people in the streets means more customers. If the van can get into the door, there is an entry zones, where delivery can be done with less than 5 min walk. Disclaimer, my father is a deliveryman for restaurants. > Any industry that routinely has to get materials (e.g. skilled trades) delivered will be inconvenienced by not being able to take delivery during mid-morning or after lunch, this can unnecessarily stretch out jobs (and cost more $$). Nope, those industries are not in the pedestrian zone, in Galicia, there is a lot of industrial areas for that matter. For white-collar, these entry areas, allow delivers to walk less than 5 min, so it's ok. Is not walk/no-walk, the city did awesome to allow entry zones and make the walking culture for all of us.
• thales_m 8y ago
  What about people who live inside city limits but work elsewhere? For example, I currently reside in Washington, DC but work about 30 min away. There is no public transportation to my work. At night, I park in a garage but there are others who park on the street and commute out of the city every morning.
  • boobsbr 8y ago
    You're out of luck, the sentiment in this thread is you should just ride a bike.
  • maaaats 8y ago
    This would solve itself if cars were banned. Either you would have to find a more practical place to live, the city add public transportation to the work, you find a new place to work, the work moving offices etc. It's only a problem because you decide things has to be exactly like they are. But with other constraints the society would have landed on an other configuration.
    • CapricornNoble 8y ago
      Every solution in your second sentence either costs businesses money or costs your workforce money. What is your solution for your economy when BOTH decide to relocate to an administrative region that DOESN'T ban cars? I've considered other places to live in Asia, namely Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. I found that used Japanese sports cars (I own several) were all prohibitively expensive to import/register in each. The crazy-low "total cost of ownership" for automobiles is one of several reasons that Japan is my primary base of operations/residence.
      • boomlinde 8y ago
        I'm sure that if you're into car sports you could get someone to sponsor the import.
    • thales_m 8y ago
      Your're right, I am looking at it through a self-centered perspective. But I think a lot of people would do the same. If you banned cars, considering how long it takes for decent public transportation to roll out in the US, you would be incentivizing people to live elsewhere. My job and work location are fixed so the only option would be to move out of the city or suffer through a miserable commute. I guess people like me would suffer and those that spend all or most of their time inside city limits would benefit.
• pasta 8y ago
  It's also possible to design cities for both people and cars. The trick is to separate them. For example a shopping street where no cars are allowed could have parking lots at the back of the shops. So trucks can supply the shops and customers can pickup large goods with their car. Another method is what we call in Dutch a ​'Cauliflower-neighbourhood'. The closer a road comes to the place were people live, the smaller they become. And speed limits will go down as well. The limits most of the time go from 50km/h to 30km/h to 15 or even 5km/h.
• eloycoto 8y ago
  Hi! I'm living in one of the closes villages around Pontevedra, I'm heabilly use the city, and I'm doing some remote job for an SF startup. If you have questions, I'm happy to help and provide feedback.
  • yAnonymous 8y ago
    What do people do who have to commute to the city for work? What do you do when you have to buy a few boxes of beer for a party that are too heavy to carry? How do emergency services work?
    • eloycoto 8y ago
      1) There are a few types: - Working in the city center --> Walking mainly. - Working outside of the city --> Cars/bus The city that has banned the cars is the city centre, but is a round island, so in 10-25 min walk, there are parking slots, where you can drive from. 2) Shopping trolley, instead of buying a lot one day, you ended that each day you pick up a few things. (And this is great, 15 min day walking) 3) All the emergency services can go to the city centre, so cars are banned, but if you have an event or emergency cars can get into, here is the common sense rule. And there is a benefit here, kids are in the street, and due a lot of kids in the street, that moves the street from unsafe, to full of #know people, that make things super safe.
      • yAnonymous 8y ago
        Thanks. I suppose the common sense rule also applies if you buy furniture or move in or out of an apartment.
        • eloycoto 8y ago
          Yes!
          • TheCoelacanth 8y ago
            How about more frequent deliveries like stores or restaurants that need to get deliveries every few days?
• nobody271 8y ago
  I walk to the grocery store most days. It seems to kill several birds with one stone: - unwind after work - get exercise - get outside - time to think You would think it would be a lot more popular but it's not. It seems more like there must be something wrong with you if you walk on a daily basis lol. ... societal norms I guess.
  • claydavisss 8y ago
    Come back when you are seventy and tell us if you still enjoy cycling with forty pounds of groceries This entire thread is predicated on building cities for young single men
    • Uberphallus 8y ago
      When you have things at walk distance you don't need to buy 40 pounds of groceries. That's a US suburban problem.
    • cf141q5325 8y ago
      70 year old people are exactly those who already walk to the next shop multiple times a week. You should keep in mind that this article is from Europe. Its walking short distances and even shorter shopping lists.
    • nobody271 8y ago
      If all you're getting is dinner that's only a couple pounds tops. But I walk. Cycling wouldn't be difficult at all.
    • kaybe 8y ago
      I am not sure you should be driving a car at seventy if you're not able to ride a bike anymore despite a livetime of experience. (and you can get bikes for various disabilities, yes)
    • TheCoelacanth 8y ago
      Elderly people are often helped the most this type of change. People who can no longer drive can still get around by other means. My grandfather had a tricycle that he rode for many years after he became incapable of driving a car.
• Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Most cities in the Netherlands have a car-free inner city or shopping streets, no need to idolize this particular one. Going from a congested city to a car-free one is a good move though. Interestingly, while Amsterdam's historic inner city is fully open to cars, you don't really see much of them - in part because it's just not practical, in part because parking is very expensive.
• dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >pedestrianised all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre It's a lot less impressive when you realize that they just banned cars from the area that was optimized for foot traffic anyway. Good on them for not trying to go to far and force people to walk/bike in areas designed for cars. >"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges." Tangent: This is probably the most European quote ever. Roman senators, medieval lords, members of parliament, Napoleon, the Kaiser, etc, etc. could have all said this. >And the same shopkeepers who complain are the ones who have survived in spite of the crisis Surviving in spite of the crisis does not make the crisis fun or necessary. It took a lot of boarded up shops before my city took away the bike lanes and put back the on-street parking (no, the failed businesses did not coincide with the recession if anyone was wondering). You gotta do what works even if it's not what fits your political objectives. If an area of the city was designed for pedestrians that's probably what will work best there. If an area of the city was designed for cars then that's probably what will work best there. It's a disservice to taxpayers to use their money to jam a square peg in a round hole or vise-versa. >The works were all financed locally and received no aid from regional or central government. Good on them for not asking for a handout.
  • JetSetWilly 8y ago
    >"while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges." There's nothing European about it, despite the fantasy of Europe being comfortable with dictatorships. Driving a car is also a privilege in the US - try driving one without your state-sanctioned license to do so and you will discover that. By the way, Members of Parliament are democratically elected so I am not sure how they fit in with the rest of the motley crew.
• elcapitan 8y ago
  One of the most interesting experiences in my life was visiting Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur. On that day all car traffic is prohibited (also TV stations are offline etc). It was absolutely amazing. Tel Aviv is a city with large roads and usually extremely busy. On that day, cyclists ride over the highway, kids play on the streets. I never felt that directly before how invasive the normal car situation is. Here's a photo https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2015/09/F141003FFDS008-e1442908153128-640x400.jpg https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2015/09/F141003...
  • chadash 8y ago
    Just to clarify, there is no law that I know of prohibiting car traffic on yom kippur in Tel Aviv. However, since this is the most important holiday of the year, even many Israelis who don't celebrate other holidays will celebrate this one. I believe that virtually all businesses are closed that day, even those that don't close on other Jewish holidays (again, not illegal to operate, but customary). So in practice, few people will be driving that day/night.
    • elcapitan 8y ago
      Thanks for the clarification! Strong moral code though, I haven't seen one non-official car that day.
      • jimmaswell 8y ago
        Moral code or just social pressure - the discomfort of the thought of disobeying the tradition and everyone glaring at you as you drive down the road outweighs the benefits of doing so even if you don't believe in the tradition.
    • Double_a_92 8y ago
      What about hotels? E.g. if somebody wants to visit especially for that holiday.
      • 8y ago
• bluGill 8y ago
  Many cities in the US have banned cars from a significant number of Downtown Streets. We call them skyways for the most part, though sometimes they are underground. It works well, keeps cars out of the way of people. It also makes for a nice environment to walk around. Our zoning is such that those streets close at night, and I wouldn't recommend them in the late hours before they are officially closed.
• jfroma 8y ago
  There is a pedestrian city in my province (Córdoba, Argentina) called La Cumbrecita. You leave your car in the entrance to the city in a parking lot and you can walk the entire town. First time I visit there made me wonder why not all towns aren't pedestrian like this. I mean most towns have nice sidewalks and are walkable but why not just banning cars. In addition to having less noise I can imagine plenty of other benefits. > [La Cumbrecita] is completely pedestrian and reminiscent of the small German towns of the fifteenth century. One can hike up through the town (and then down) to the waterfall, a truly paradisiacal experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cumbrecita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cumbrecita
• helios893 8y ago
  I have a fantasy that once a year a major US cities (think Manhattan) ban private cars for a day. Public Transit, and emergency vehicles pass as normal.
• erkken 8y ago
  Cars have to some extent led us through part of the industrial revolution. However, it's my belief that cars, except from polluting the environment and destroying our cities - makes people unhappy and sad. Visiting LA this summer, I knew I was in for a car heavy metropolis but this... I can't understand why people waste so much time of their precious life (usually alone which also greatly worsen the problem) - locked in a car. Coming to the topic of the autonomous car revolution, which I frankly do not understand. Sometimes it feels like the ambition is to end up as the humans in WALL-E. What kind of life is that? Ps. Coming from Europe, I crossed US by bicycle a few years ago, from NY to US. People say it's a country to be seen through a car, but I argue it's to be seen on a bike.
  • avgDev 8y ago
    I was born in Europe and lived there for 14 years before moving to US. I went there recently. I also recently visited LA..... Most people I know from smaller cities in Poland own cars or would love to own a car but simply cannot afford it as gas is really expensive, so are cars compared to incomes. When I visited I rented a car which allowed me to see so many things all over the country. I would not able to visit so many locations without a car. Same goes for LA, renting a car allowed me to travel from LA to San Diego on a relatively short trip. In NY over 50% households are car-free. In Chicago about 30% of households are car-free. People travel to cities for various reasons, often they don't do it daily. My wife traveled to school by train in city of chicago for one year, then she switched to driving her car, she saved a lot of time on her commute, and didn't have to deal with weirdos on the trains at night. Cars are here to stay. Some people drive less by utilizing services like amazon but then amazon needs to deliver packages, but, I guess that still minimizes fuel consumption as things are delivered in a more efficient way.
• CalRobert 8y ago
  Not sure what your situation is but there are a fair number of options for people who are decent programmers to move to Europe permanently..
  • xxpor 8y ago
    It's hard to justify when you could potentially be looking at a 50% pay cut. That's the only reason I haven't moved myself.
    • lexs 8y ago
      Do you actually get anything out of that 50% more pay? Thinking about higher rent, healthcare etc.
      • drstewart 8y ago
        The rent is higher in the US? Have you seen rent prices in London, Amsterdam, or Dublin? Health care is included in any well paying tech job. Please list out the other "etc" that makes up for $100,000+ difference.
      • mywittyname 8y ago
        Absolutely. Only a few cities in the USA are expensive on an international level. The cost of living in most regions of the USA is so incredibly low that a decent programmer has a shot of having a paid off house & car, no student loans, and $100k or so retirement account by the age of 30 (assuming graduating college @22). Where I live, the median house price is about $170k USD (avg rent is just under $900/mo) and the median software engineer salary is just under $100k USD. Plus, taxes in the USA can be pretty low.
        • symlinkk 8y ago
          Where do you live?
          • 8y ago
• machisuji 8y ago
  I'd love to live in a city like this. I spent a couple of days in Dublin and it was just crazy how loud, crowded and congested with cars and buses the city is. Was not really pleasant walking through the city.
• anjc 8y ago
  This may be nice in a sunny seaside tourist city, but any pedestrianised towns I've been to in the UK are barren, dull, and frankly scary once the sun starts to set.
• undefined_user4 8y ago
  Leftist propaganda.
• dmix 8y ago
  Once all cars become electric this will solve one of the biggest problems. Then once they become self-driving the other 25% of noise (honking, sirens, etc) would be significantly reduced.
  • aerique 8y ago
    You'd still have the visual pollution of cars
    • jimmaswell 8y ago
      You can thank exacting regulations with the goal of safety/etc for modern calls all looking samey and generally ugly. I feel like there must be ways to give more leeway to aesthetic design without compromising what's truly necessary in terms of safety and economy.
  • pouetpouet 8y ago
    Half of the problem with cars is a geometric one, they take up too much space. They give rise to sprawl and thus increase the demand for cars in a vicious cycle. Them being electric or self driving will not solve that.
    • dmix 8y ago
      Still, noise is a major factor. Just take the mayor's comments from the article and the opening sentence: > In Pontevedra, the usual soundtrack of a Spanish city has been replaced by the tweeting of birds and the chatter of humans > “Listen,” says the mayor, opening the windows of his office. From the street below rises the sound of human voices. Noise is the #1 problem with cars. Walkability and space issues via parking are #2.
      • darkstar999 8y ago
        A lot of the sound of cars are them moving over the road, not the engine noise. Electric wouldn't help.
    • 8y ago
• sebringj 8y ago
  I don't know why this didn't occur to me but in San Juan Capistrano, CA, I enjoy that place so much with my kids because of the fairly large area where cars have to have very slow speed limit or no cars allowed at all and pure walking which was far better even. There is such freedom allowing your children to laugh and play and walk on their own pace without worrying they'll be run over and having to strictly hold their hand near each cross walk where cars zip by at instant collision death speeds. I could hear the birds too. Was calming and slows the perception of time so you can actually relax.
  • technofiend 8y ago
    There is a gated neighborhood of large, well appointed homes near Rice University in Houston.* They open up every once in a while for tours, particularly at Christmas. More than once kids or adults raised there have mentioned being able to just play in the street as one of their fondest memories of the place. In car-centric Houston their experience is rare if not exactly unique. *1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadyside,_Houston https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadyside,_Houston
    • komali2 8y ago
      Ex-Houstonian here: down there we worship and give sacrifice to the motor gods. We'll build massive multi million dollar freeway interchanges[0] as monument to our gods. No place for busses. Our attempt at public transit was a slow tram that runs up and down main street through dozens of intersections, pushing any hapless motorist not expecting a train on the fucking road it encounters out of the way. So when rice closes off the gates, it is like a little paradise. I disagree that it's "not unique," I can't think of a single other place in tbe entirety of Houston (a city so wide that it can take two hours to drive across if you go corner to corner, in non-rush-hour) where you get to experience that. [0]https://goo.gl/images/ZYJfEo https://goo.gl/images/ZYJfEo
      • technofiend 8y ago
        >I disagree that it's "not unique," When I say it's "not unique" I'm acknowledging there are other gated communities with low traffic. The closest one I can think of to Rice is in Montrose on Courtland Place. If you ever went to KPFT on Lovett and noticed a big wall where Lovett ends that's the back side of their little community. Look on street view or satellite view of Google maps at Bagby and Courtland Place to see what I mean. Also the first neighborhood I listed is separate and distinct from the Rice University campus. It shares a border but it's not part of their land holdings: all the homes are privately owned.
• Barjak 8y ago
  >People don’t like being told they can’t drive wherever they want, but Lores says that while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges. This strikes me as the fundamental issue.
  • wahern 8y ago
    Modern discourse about "rights" has become twisted. Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition. A society needs to choose its rights wisely lest the unintended consequences result in less overall freedom. In a healthy civil society legally enshrined rights are less important because you can trust that everybody's freedom will be maximized, at least to a first-order approximation. In unhealthy societies legal rights are often cold comfort.
    • gascan 8y ago
      IMO as we accumulated more and more "rights", the concept became diluted. We went from the bedrock negative rights of freedom of speech, travel, etc, then to positive rights, and then people started applying the concept of "rights" to what I would consider "entitlements".
      • flatb 8y ago
        It's all the same debate, really. After all is said and done, rights function to entitle you to things or acts. The blurry line that I believe you might be talking about has a very specific name, but recent social and public discourse make a lot of people nowadays automatically cringe at it's sight (wrongly, IMO) without seriously hearing out or considering it's merits. I'm talking about the word "privilege".
    • HillaryBriss 8y ago
      > Some day we need to realize that one person's right is another person's prohibition. In college a professor told us "You can't grant a right without taking one away." In recent decades, the US trend seems to have been toward more individual rights and fewer community/state rights.
• Invictus0 8y ago
  The Las Vegas Strip is the antithesis of this. It's probably the only place in the world where the main downtown area is also an 8 lane highway. It's so bad that you actually cannot cross the street there, and you have to get around by walking on raised walkways above the street. Uniquely terrible urban planning. https://odis.homeaway.com/odis/destination/2ee03d5b-c981-44df-ae3a-e526f7e3ec01.hw1.jpg https://odis.homeaway.com/odis/destination/2ee03d5b-c981-44d... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/Las_Vegas_%2822096744189%29.jpg/1200px-Las_Vegas_%2822096744189%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/15/La... http://theworldisurban.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ElevatedWalkway.jpg http://theworldisurban.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Elevat...
• honkycat 8y ago
  I really dislike cars and being around cars. They are noisy. They ruin the air quality of a city. They take up massive amounts of space through parking that could be better used. They force the public to subsidize car owners. They kill people through both air pollution and through collisions. They dominate a city's life in an extremely unattractive way. I base a lot of my existence around avoiding cars and living in places where I can have a pleasant walk without having to deal with traffic. To the point where I recently moved from Chicago, Illinois to Portland, Oregon because Portland is a much more pedestrian friendly city. And it shows. You walk around the city and it's actually alive and working. In Portland, people don't have to have their children on leashes because every street isn't a 4 lane highway with constant traffic that is disrespectful to people's space. People are strolling down the streets and wandering into businesses. In Portland drivers slow down and wave you across the street instead of swerving around you at 40 miles an hour. In Chicago a common occurrence was for a car to decide to make a red light, so they would make a turn into a crowd of pedestrians who are crossing the street and "shoot the gap" without slowing down, with maybe 3 feet of clearance on either side. People would open doors without a second thought and door bikers. Trucks would make dangerous turns into bikers and frequently kill them ( A young woman was recently killed this way, and I once had to jump off of my bike and drag it onto the sidewalk to avoid being run over ). Cars drivers seem to enter this "magic circle" where it's fine to do dumb and extremely dangerous things because you are driving. When you are in a car, all behavior is acceptable. Decide to teach the biker a lesson by turning into them? They won't charge you with anything. Swerve into a crowd of pedestrians? It's fine normal behavior. Make a blind turn into an alley and have to slam on the breaks to avoid running into a pedestrian? Totally A-OK chief! Great work! As has been pointed out elsewhere, a lot of European cities do not have this problem. When visiting France, I went to the city of Strasbourg where they have a very nice little "park and ride" system where you park your fume-spewing, space-taking machine and park it in the PARKING AREA, instead of letting you drag it into their beautiful city. strongtowns.org has a lot of great information about how the US road infrastructure is, to put it bluntly, a dumb and bad experiment that has failed.
  • snarfybarfy 8y ago
    > I really dislike cars and being around cars. They are noisy. They ruin the air quality of a city. I guess you are not alone. Given a certain location, the singlemost important indicator of your house price is the amount of cars driving by each day. A factor of 3 in my immediate neighborhood: $15k per m^2 in a cul de sac vs. only a 100 meters apart $5k per m^2 next to a 4-lane road with quite some traffic.
• sunshinelackof 8y ago
  As a kid in the early '90s the corner market, grocery store, schools from elementary to high, both jobs I had, and park were all within a 10 minute walk -- and that was in the suburbs. Cars don't need to be a requirement for daily life even in the suburbs it just requires good planning or planning at all.
  • closeparen 8y ago
    It’s expected that suburbs are walkable for children and maybe even stay-at-home parents, but working members of the household usually drive to work and take the family to activities (restaurants, youth sports, shopping, other adventures) outside the walkable bubble.
  • ergothus 8y ago
    For the past 50 years or so, the literal books on good design (according to the govt of the US) have specified cul-de-sacs, which offer the promise of less vehicle traffic but actually guarantee MORE traffic, because you can't have good walking paths. From a plane you can get an idea of how old an area is - old ones will have cul-de-sacs, middle-aged ones will have a fern-like structure with dead end streets that have only lines of cul-de-sacs coming off of them, and recent ones will have this fractal-like shape of cul-de-sacs of cul-de-sacs of cul-de-sacs. In those environments, nothing is walking distance (and walking paths start to become labyrinthine swirls if you actually wanted to walk them) so vehicle traffic increases.
    • mkl 8y ago
      I think that problem can be avoided to some extent with paths/cycleways. Many cul-de-sacs in parts of Christchurch, New Zealand, are only cul-de-sacs for cars, and pedestrians and cyclists have a through-route. This can lead to situations where driving means covering a much greater distance, and is one of the enablers of the city's current focus on increasing bike-friendliness (the other being that it's very flat, unlike much of other NZ cities). It's still a pretty car-centric place, however.
  • always_good 8y ago
• tokyodude 8y ago
  I grew up in the suburbs in Los Angeles. I lived on a cul de sac. Think the family house in ET. We played in the street all the time. That seems pretty normal for suburbia isn't it? I would ride around the block or over to the next cul-de-sac from like 4yrs old.
• ummonk 8y ago
  Urbanists who hate cars like to tear down freeways. E.g. in SF they tore down the Embarcadero and Central freeways, instead of repairing and extending them. This of course forces more cars onto the streets, making life worse for everyone.
  • jrockway 8y ago
    But to be fair, San Francisco did not even want the Embarcadero freeway and proposed a tunnel that the state nixed. When the thing collapsed in an earthquake it was a pretty easy choice to not spend money building something the city didn't even want. You do have to agree that not having to walk under a urine-soaked freeway to get to the waterfront is an improvement to the city. The tunnel would have also been fine, of course.
• quincy_daniels 8y ago
  I would like to take this moment to advertise a project currently under development in my city: https://beltline.org/about/the-atlanta-beltline-project/atlanta-beltline-overview/ https://beltline.org/about/the-atlanta-beltline-project/atla... The Atlanta belt-line is mostly being built on top of old light rail line around the city. The idea, as I understand it, is to provide a pedestrian and (unfortunately) cyclists only pathway that connects many of the notable places around the city. On this pathway, there already exists a large amount of beltline and road accessible shopping/restaurants/bars. There are plans to build a large amount similarly accessible housing on the beltline as well. I assert that this strategy is a better alternative than closing off convex sections for cities similar to Atlanta. What would define a city similar to Atlanta? One that is not very dense, with some undeveloped or neglected land in urban areas, and whose centers of social activity are decentralized. By saying the centers of social activity are decentralized, I mean to say that the major parks, stadiums, shopping developments, chic neighborhoods, and so on, are dispersed around a few mile radius of downtown. Shutting of any two square mile area to car traffic would fail to capture more than a few of these places, and cause worse traffic problems elsewhere, which is costly regardless of how you approach it. There are some downsides to the beltline of course, mainly its cost, but you get the same opportunity for a pedestrian urban experience, without overtly turning it into a political battle.
• escot 8y ago
  Most of Golden Gate Park in SF is closed to cars every Sunday (and Saturday during summer) and it is really magical. Normally living in a city makes you feel tiny but this makes you feel like everyone is on the same level. http://sfrecpark.org/permits-and-reservations/special-events/golden-gate-park-road-closures/ http://sfrecpark.org/permits-and-reservations/special-events...
• efrafa 8y ago
  In Slovakia every bigger city have pedestrian zone with no cars. Its the one of the best things you can do for city.
• hulton 8y ago
  Eliminate cars. Eliminate the options for people to be autonomous. Pack everyone into major metropolitan cities by the millions. Stop building houses. Build Up. Build condos and apartments. Eliminate the option for people to buy land because it is unsustainable and the state knows better. Sounds like a perfect dystopian society.
• yohann305 8y ago
  All of a sudden, Elon Musk's vision to have all traffic underground is a lot more sound. I love this guy, seeing him so misunderstood makes me sad.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• iaresee 8y ago
  We were living in downtown Toronto during [the Northeast blackout of 2003](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003). It was amazing to experience the city, for several days, without the usual crush of cars and trucks and busses on the roads. Really magic couple of days I'll never forget.
• breatheoften 8y ago
  Its insane to me how large space-wise small towns in the us (Oregon in mind as I write this) are — with a huge percentage of the real estate devoted to parking lots. Even setting aside the traffic, it’s silly to walk across these towns because businesses are separated from each other by massive parking lots. The traffic is often amazingly inhumane. Many of the small towns in Oregon are formed on either side of the major highway which has speed limits within the town but still sees so much traffic as to be very dangerous for pedestrians. These towns need the commercial visitors brought by the highway to survive — but the design common in Europe for this scenario is so much better. There will be a sign for an exit off the main road for the “city center” exit — there will be a single parking lot for the city center, and then comfortable walking distance to the businesses ... superior design. Many small, especially old, towns in Europe have ancient road layouts that are too narrow and steep for cars within the town — which resulted in these car free designs for free. It’s beautiful. Parking is easy because there is only one place to do it on the outskirts — and then walk everywhere. There is no improvement for a small town to be designed otherwise in my opinion.
  • sunshinelackof 8y ago
    Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. A solution is to level the planes of separation between types of traffic in urban areas. With pedestrians closer to cars the cars have to go slower by nature. It's antithetical to the common logic and current policy of building walking paths completely separate from roads and all of the businesses attached to them.
    • electricslpnsld 8y ago
      > Even Portland and Eugene love to boast how bicycle friendly they are, but neither are really commutable by anything besides a car for most people. Which is why most cyclists are so prolific -- it's hard to be a cyclist by circumstance. Riding your bike inherently comes with crossing a dozen intersections beaming with cars that treat you like you don't belong on the road. I commuted by bike for two years or so in Portland -- for work from North Portland to downtown across the Broadway bridge, and for fun when visiting friends all over south east -- and that wasn't my experience at all, Portland drivers were incredibly courteous to cyclists. You could take the lane when needed and no one batted an eye, people would correctly negotiate right of way with bikes at four way stops, etc. Contrast that to Oakland where I live now where I receive death threats on a daily basis for riding in the bike lane. :)
• timonoko 8y ago
  European cities were very much pedestrian and bike town in the 1950's. In Helsinki they proposed banning bikes from city center, because they caused traffic congestion and gave poorish image of Finland. Bike paths were kept open all year manually. I biked some 10 km to school and every single day dozens of guys had woken at 5 o'clock and shoveled and sanded narrow but adequate bike path just for me.
• jaysonelliot 8y ago
  The one question I have, that I haven't seen answered in the article or elsewhere, is how deliveries are handled. Presumably shops and businesses in a car-free city need to get truckloads of goods or equipment moved in and out on a regular basis. How is it done? I've always loved the idea of being able to live in a car-free city, but never quite understood how certain things would work, including garbage collection, deliveries, and emergency services, without vehicular traffic. Or do they make exceptions for all of those? Does anyone know?
  • GijsjanB 8y ago
    Where I live, the municipality is seriously looking into an out of the city distribution centre with (smaller, electric) vehicles for supplying the city centre. That doesn't make it free of cars, but it will be more efficient (not every shop needs their own supply truck, supplies can be shared).
    • jaysonelliot 8y ago
      Which city is that?
• JepZ 8y ago
  In Germany we have a similar paradise: the island Helgoland [1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heligoland#Road_restrictions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heligoland#Road_restrictions
  • anticensor 8y ago
    Helgoland is a tax haven, too. Only thing it lacks is an organised business district.
• nayuki 8y ago
  The article has similar sentiments on promoting walkable cities as the whole blog "Strong Towns". https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• plgonzalezrx8 8y ago
  That must feel so weird, but at the same time, so quiet and peaceful.
• lifeformed 8y ago
  Are stores and restaurants able to get supplies by vehicle to restock?
• jasonrhaas 8y ago
  I really like the idea of restricting where and when people can drive their cars. In China there are policies in place that only allow to commute with your car on certain days of the week. The other days you need to use public transport or find a car pool. A lot of Americans think that they should be able to drive and park their car when and where ever they want. This mentality needs to change if we want to continue to grow our cities sustainably.
• clon 8y ago
  I am sure it also helps tourism. I'm definitely putting this on my bucket list when going to Spain next time.
• dre85 8y ago
  I'll preface this with saying that I own two cars and in general like cars. However, I think personal motorized transportation along with industrialized animal farming are for me among the two biggest evils that arose in the last century. Cities in North America are entirely architected for the presence and convenience of cars. The mortality arising from pollution and accidents is staggering. The alienation and isolation of people as well. The cities and suburbs stretch so far out that you rarely get to see your friends unless you specifically organize something well ahead of time. Pedestrian zones with small shops are replaced with massive shopping malls. I've always imagined a modern city with no cars, but I never knew that anyone actually had the balls to make this a reality. Kudos to this Spanish city! You can try to argue that the specifics of this city make it more amenable to being car-free, but I think that if there was enough desire, it would work anywhere. Just think if everyone paid their monthly car loan/lease into the public transportation system how incredibly functional it could be.
• ansible 8y ago
  Seems like a good time to re-post this rant by James Howard Kunstler on what's wrong with modern USA urban planning: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
• teknico 8y ago
  Been there recently. The peace and quiet was uncanny, it felt like my hometown half a century ago.
• dchichkov 8y ago
  I wish, we could do that in the few feets of Murphy's Square in Sunnyvale. It would be so pleasant to not have hot spewing smog vehicles park, one feet from your dining table.
• kenmicklas 8y ago
  It drives me crazy seeing people claim to "just" prefer living in the car-oriented suburbs when 1) that lifestyle is vastly subsidized by economic activity generated in the cities 2) the biggest reason cities are unpleasant is (surprise) the high density of car traffic and noise! The mass distribution of personal cars is going to go down as the greatest mistake in societal development.
• sytelus 8y ago
  So how does these car-less cities manage followings: - Truck delivery to businesses such as large stores/shopping malls - Ambulance, police car services - Disabled/old people wanting to move around If you allow any or all of above, you still need roads for vehicles only, traffic lights etc, right?
• supernovae 8y ago
  I work in the Domain of Austin Texas, it's an outdoor mall, office park and residential area that is supposed to be like a downtown 2.0 in many ways. A place for humans to "live, shop and work" according to their mantra. In reality, it's scary to walk to whole foods to get lunch at times. Cars NEVER yield to crosswalks or pedestrians. It's so bad they have flashing LED's on the stop signs in some areas. The domain would be beautiful if parking garages were on the exterior and everyone had to walk in. Imagine being able to walk to shops, work and dining without worrying about getting plowed down by an F150 with a "thank god for our snipers" sticker on the back. In fact, the best couple of days at this area are the art walk days but its been a while since I've seen those. For the artwalk days, they close the streets and it's like a magic little city of everyone breathing easier, enjoying some quiet serenity and kids walking around without parents needing 100% attention. For the price they demand to live and lease space here, it would seem serenity and peacefulness would be the best thing they could do! (and there was plenty of land at one point for exterior garages... now its just a mad dash for people to find spots across the different garages which are all too small for the big trucks texans love)
  • WhompingWindows 8y ago
    I identify with that crosswalk yielding issue. In Boston they sometimes put up signs on the road surface itself, informing drivers that is ILLEGAL to not yield to pedestrians. I say "You broke the law" loudly whenever a driver doesn't yield in that situation, yet I've never seen any enforcement of this law. Meanwhile, law enforcement is quick to sit on the highway catching those going with the flow of traffic over the speed limit, or quick to over-police non-violent drug offenses. So sad to see enforcement of the rules of the road take a back seat, especially when it comes to pedestrians, whose chosen mode of transport is beneficial and should be encouraged.
• liquid153 8y ago
  I wonder when "I don't own a car", will be the new "I don't own a TV"
  • Mashimo 8y ago
    I never owned a TV or a car :)
• nos84733675859 8y ago
  Had a quick search and didn't see anyone talking about it. If your interested by this article you might enjoy the book 'happy city'. It's a bit one sided but looks at how cars have changed cities, and how changes can be made to make them happier.
• pixelbeat__ 8y ago
  It's interesting how people's expectations and attitudes develop. I remember landing at San Diego airport and asking how I could walk the relatively short distance into the city center. I just got looks of derision and directions to the taxi rank. I did attempt to find a walkable route myself to no avail. It's an interesting contrast to banning cars and essentially banning walking
  • Basketb926 8y ago
    San Diego airport website does give some walking details that were not known by the people you met https://www.san.org/to-from/Walking-Biking https://www.san.org/to-from/Walking-Biking
• zoom6628 8y ago
  We so so need this in Hongkong, especially in the older areas where the streets feel as narrow as a rickshaw. Public transport is excellent and ppl here so unhealthy i general they need the walking anyway! Most of the corridoor from Saiyingpun all the way to North Point at least should be car free. And pretty much all of TST through to Mongkok. More than enough metro lines and bordering causeways to move the masses in an out of the area.
  • woutr_be 8y ago
    As much as I like to see a car free HK, there's still a lot of need for vehicles in those areas, banning cars, especially in HK is not the solution. If you want people to walk more, make the city actually walk friendly, even a short walk from my apartment to the MTR station is annoying; people just randomly walk anywhere, making it impossible to enjoy walking. There's aircons leaking constantly, little newspaper stands blocking the sideways. I really enjoy walking, but in HK it's really not that fun.
• newshorts 8y ago
  my wife and I used to need to take vacations and drive to the mountains on the weekends just to get away from the stress of the city. Then we moved to an area where we can bike to two separate town centers and we haven’t felt the need to take a vacation in years. We are more social and more relaxed now, and I swear it’s because we can bike to all the places we would have driven, like restaurants, movie theaters and grocery stores. Ditching the car has been a very positive experience.
• skookumchuck 8y ago
  It'd be so nice in downtown Seattle if a few of the streets were closed off to cars for 4 hours a day or so.
• JVIDEL 8y ago
  Why is this news? The town of General Belgrano in Argentina banned cars ages ago.
• jiveturkey 8y ago
  > pedestrianised all 300,000 sq m of the medieval centre, I'm reminded of the Isle of Sark. I thought it must be bigger but wiki says it's only 5,000 sq m.