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I lived in Germany for two years without a car. The public transportation there was amazing—I learned to appreciate how little I needed a car, provided the infr

I lived in Germany for two years without a car. The public transportation there was amazing—I learned to appreciate how little I needed a car, provided the infrastructure was good enough/I had a bike. In many cities there's a "Fußgängerzone": pedestrian-only areas; these were mostly found in the city center where the streets and shops are too dense to allow much traffic. I remember specifically in Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen that the biggest shopping centers were located within this zone. Didn't seem to be hurting their business. The Fußgängerzonen seemed alive, much more so than sterile car-optimized streets.

mcv 8y ago
Many Dutch cities also have car-free pedestrian areas in their city centers. And it's not just that the biggest shopping centers happen to be there, it is exactly the busy shopping areas that are made car-free, so people can shop there in peace. There's usually a ring of car parking lots around the center, as well as on the edge of the town, so people can leave their car early and cheaply while continuing their trip to the center using public transport.
codetrotter 8y ago
> Fußgängerzone We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s interesting how similar some words are. The German word for pedestrian, “fußgänger”, is very similar to what it’s called in Norwegian, which is “fotgjenger”. You’ll hear how similar they are if you know how to pronounce these words in both German and Norwegian. If you don’t you might see the visual similarity but not realize just how similar they sound as well. And in both cases the word is composed of the word for “foot” (fuß / fot) and a word derived from “walk”.
- wenderen 8y ago
  They're both Germanic languages! Learning Norwegian definitely helped me brush up on my German for free - at least, reading and to a lesser extent speaking.
  - smallnamespace 8y ago
    And of course 'footganger' almost makes sense in English — 'gang' in the sense of a passage is preserved in 'gangplank', and modern 'gang' has the related sense of 'group of people who go together'.
    - Scarblac 8y ago
      But "gang" here doesn't mean passage, it's the noon of the verb to go. It's foot-goer.
    - MisterOctober 8y ago
      Yep! It also shows up in loan vocabulary like "doppelganger" [double-goer] and old-timey quotes like "gang aft agley" [go often awry, via Robert Burns' "To A Mouse"]
      - smcl 8y ago
        In the case of Burns it’s not a loan word from German in English, but an actual Scots word: http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gang http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gang
    - NicoJuicy 8y ago
      Footwalker would be a more appropriate translation, German uses more describing words.
      - jhanschoo 8y ago
        Well, there's already the footwalk. I think the parent comment was going more for using etymologically related words.
    - benc666 8y ago
      In Afrikaans - spoken in ZA (south africa) - that is pretty much the actual word :) "voetganger" "voet" - foot/feet "ganger" - someone who moves along using the former noun The Latin Root is what connects many European languages.
- wingerlang 8y ago
  Did you only now realize this similarity?
thomasahle 8y ago
This was tried some places in the US in the part. Unfortunately most times they failed. Unable to attract enough people, they felt even less alive than the streets and entered a cycle a of death. However there are some signs of a rebirth: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275887405_American_downtown_pedestrian_malls_rise_fall_and_rebirth https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275887405_American_...
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  Right, you can't just shut down an area to cars and call it a day, if the overall area is still designed around cars. To really make it work, the area has to be accessible to walking (and public transport). Which usually means higher population densities than most US cities -- even major cities -- have, and better public transit.
  - white-flame 8y ago
    Also massive parking structures. It's the interface between car-places and walking-places, necessary for the otherwise car-centric norm outside.
    - chmod775 8y ago
      Virtually no Fußgängerzone in Germany has that, but it might be worth consideration for lack of better alternatives like public transport.
      - _ph_ 8y ago
        A lot of German cities has large parking garages acrosss the city centers. So it is quite possible to drive to those garages by car and then continue by foot. Cologne for example had an electronic system in place even 30 years ago, which would account all free parking spots in the big garages. Those numbers would be relayed to traffic signs at the big roads leading into the city. So while approaching the inner city you could see the total amount of free parking spaces and as you get closer you would get signs pointing out this number for the individual garages. So it was quite easy to directly find a parking slot as long as there was a reasonable amount of slot left.
manmal 8y ago
In the place where I live (Austria, town with 30k residents), the Fußgängerzone in the center is currently dying. Shops close left and right, and migrate to the three big shopping centers. This town is a strange mix because almost everybody needs to own a car (bus system is underdeveloped) to take kids to school or shop groceries, but the town itself is not that big (a lot of places are reachable by bike). Most people rather use the newly rebuilt, comfortable malls with free parking and major brand chains over the harder-to-reach-by-car town center with parking fees and mom-and-pop stores. The administration is taking desperate measures now, trying to keep shops from closing by promising funding etc, but it turns out the big malls made exclusive deals with brands and there’s not much anyone can do. I guess Fußgängerzonen only work with an intact public transport system that people can rely on and that won’t take you thrice as long to get there.
- elliotec 8y ago
  But in Vienna, it seems like the Fußgängerzonen are all over the middle of the city and have a mix of the fancy brands that would normally be in a shopping center, while also having smaller and more boutique shops.
  - stewbrew 8y ago
    There are also Fußgängerzonen in other districts like Mariahilf, Meidling, Favoriten etc. You're right that they are mainly for shopping but the shops were already there before the streets were turned into Fußgängerzonen. The Fußgängerzonen helped to keep the shops and thus the city alive. There are also plenty of restaurants, cafés etc.
- oska 8y ago
  Why do parents feel the need to take children to school in a small town in a very safe country? Why can't they ride a bike or walk?
  - manmal 8y ago
    With a dysfunctional public transit system and unsafe bike lanes (not separated from the road), that doesn’t always work. Our school is 10km away, so for us, bike is off the table for now.
egeozcan 8y ago
I'm living in Gießen, it's very close to Frankfurt am Main. Seltersweg street, being a Fußgängerzone, is the main attraction of the city. There's a slow but sure trend though: Big shops are closing and more restaurants are opening. It's probably the effect of online shopping. I am raised in İstanbul and the same thing was happening in the Taksim/Beyoğlu/Asmalımescit areas when I was still living there even 10 years ago.
woodpanel 8y ago
One has to know that there are trends in urban planning and one of those trends is our current focus on cars being a net-negative to human life and how banning them from cities altogether can only yield net-positives. Clearly this trend is intertwined with the demographic trend of migrating to the urban cores all across the West. So it’s a good thing you‘ve mentioned the Fußgängerzone, which were a trend in the 1950-1970s and German cities adapted them just to find out that they can become a booster of decay, if demographics and economics as well as just the trend don’t hold up (homelessness, empty shopfronts, only elderly folk, unemployed youth hanging around). Fußgängerzonen are largely considered a failed experiment (And because of widespread bombing in WW2 German cities had plenty of room for experiments, which often failed). That they seem to work today, might have more todo with spill over effects from urban population growth, urban revival and a narrow set of datapoints (Fußgängerzonen if plighted areas are often not known to outsiders).
Vinnl 8y ago
Heck, I've been allowed to get a driver's license for over a decade in the Netherlands, but neither I nor my partner has one. Granted, most of my friends to have one, but almost none of them have a car. It helps that we live in a large city, and one that actively discourages driving and encourages public transport and cycling (even by Dutch standards), but not only is it not necessary to drive, it's often the worst transportation option.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  Fellow Dutch person, mid thirties and no driver's license here either. With the exception of moving between apartments I have never really felt like I missed it
- Scarblac 8y ago
  I got the license at 35, with kids having a car around often saves a lot of trouble. But we still only use it twice a week or so.
  - Vinnl 8y ago
    Absolutely, I expect to be doing the same if I ever do have kids. Primarily for e.g. holidays and such, I think.
em3rgent0rdr 8y ago
> "The public transportation there was amazing" My view is that public transportation in a lot of European cities are great because the cities were built for pedestrians, not cars. It is not the public transportation that makes cities practical without a car. Rather it is cities accessible without a car that makes public transportation practical.

mcv 8y ago

Many Dutch cities also have car-free pedestrian areas in their city centers. And it's not just that the biggest shopping centers happen to be there, it is exactly the busy shopping areas that are made car-free, so people can shop there in peace. There's usually a ring of car parking lots around the center, as well as on the edge of the town, so people can leave their car early and cheaply while continuing their trip to the center using public transport.

codetrotter 8y ago

> Fußgängerzone We have these in Norway as well. Here they are called “gågate” (“walking street”), but what I actually wanted to say was that I think it’s interesting how similar some words are. The German word for pedestrian, “fußgänger”, is very similar to what it’s called in Norwegian, which is “fotgjenger”. You’ll hear how similar they are if you know how to pronounce these words in both German and Norwegian. If you don’t you might see the visual similarity but not realize just how similar they sound as well. And in both cases the word is composed of the word for “foot” (fuß / fot) and a word derived from “walk”.

wenderen 8y ago
They're both Germanic languages! Learning Norwegian definitely helped me brush up on my German for free - at least, reading and to a lesser extent speaking.
- smallnamespace 8y ago
  And of course 'footganger' almost makes sense in English — 'gang' in the sense of a passage is preserved in 'gangplank', and modern 'gang' has the related sense of 'group of people who go together'.
  - Scarblac 8y ago
    But "gang" here doesn't mean passage, it's the noon of the verb to go. It's foot-goer.
  - MisterOctober 8y ago
    Yep! It also shows up in loan vocabulary like "doppelganger" [double-goer] and old-timey quotes like "gang aft agley" [go often awry, via Robert Burns' "To A Mouse"]
    - smcl 8y ago
      In the case of Burns it’s not a loan word from German in English, but an actual Scots word: http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gang http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gang
  - NicoJuicy 8y ago
    Footwalker would be a more appropriate translation, German uses more describing words.
    - jhanschoo 8y ago
      Well, there's already the footwalk. I think the parent comment was going more for using etymologically related words.
  - benc666 8y ago
    In Afrikaans - spoken in ZA (south africa) - that is pretty much the actual word :) "voetganger" "voet" - foot/feet "ganger" - someone who moves along using the former noun The Latin Root is what connects many European languages.
wingerlang 8y ago
Did you only now realize this similarity?

thomasahle 8y ago

This was tried some places in the US in the part. Unfortunately most times they failed. Unable to attract enough people, they felt even less alive than the streets and entered a cycle a of death. However there are some signs of a rebirth: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275887405_American_downtown_pedestrian_malls_rise_fall_and_rebirth https://www.researchgate.net/publication/275887405_American_...

TulliusCicero 8y ago
Right, you can't just shut down an area to cars and call it a day, if the overall area is still designed around cars. To really make it work, the area has to be accessible to walking (and public transport). Which usually means higher population densities than most US cities -- even major cities -- have, and better public transit.
- white-flame 8y ago
  Also massive parking structures. It's the interface between car-places and walking-places, necessary for the otherwise car-centric norm outside.
  - chmod775 8y ago
    Virtually no Fußgängerzone in Germany has that, but it might be worth consideration for lack of better alternatives like public transport.
    - _ph_ 8y ago
      A lot of German cities has large parking garages acrosss the city centers. So it is quite possible to drive to those garages by car and then continue by foot. Cologne for example had an electronic system in place even 30 years ago, which would account all free parking spots in the big garages. Those numbers would be relayed to traffic signs at the big roads leading into the city. So while approaching the inner city you could see the total amount of free parking spaces and as you get closer you would get signs pointing out this number for the individual garages. So it was quite easy to directly find a parking slot as long as there was a reasonable amount of slot left.

manmal 8y ago

In the place where I live (Austria, town with 30k residents), the Fußgängerzone in the center is currently dying. Shops close left and right, and migrate to the three big shopping centers. This town is a strange mix because almost everybody needs to own a car (bus system is underdeveloped) to take kids to school or shop groceries, but the town itself is not that big (a lot of places are reachable by bike). Most people rather use the newly rebuilt, comfortable malls with free parking and major brand chains over the harder-to-reach-by-car town center with parking fees and mom-and-pop stores. The administration is taking desperate measures now, trying to keep shops from closing by promising funding etc, but it turns out the big malls made exclusive deals with brands and there’s not much anyone can do. I guess Fußgängerzonen only work with an intact public transport system that people can rely on and that won’t take you thrice as long to get there.

elliotec 8y ago
But in Vienna, it seems like the Fußgängerzonen are all over the middle of the city and have a mix of the fancy brands that would normally be in a shopping center, while also having smaller and more boutique shops.
- stewbrew 8y ago
  There are also Fußgängerzonen in other districts like Mariahilf, Meidling, Favoriten etc. You're right that they are mainly for shopping but the shops were already there before the streets were turned into Fußgängerzonen. The Fußgängerzonen helped to keep the shops and thus the city alive. There are also plenty of restaurants, cafés etc.
oska 8y ago
Why do parents feel the need to take children to school in a small town in a very safe country? Why can't they ride a bike or walk?
- manmal 8y ago
  With a dysfunctional public transit system and unsafe bike lanes (not separated from the road), that doesn’t always work. Our school is 10km away, so for us, bike is off the table for now.

egeozcan 8y ago

I'm living in Gießen, it's very close to Frankfurt am Main. Seltersweg street, being a Fußgängerzone, is the main attraction of the city. There's a slow but sure trend though: Big shops are closing and more restaurants are opening. It's probably the effect of online shopping. I am raised in İstanbul and the same thing was happening in the Taksim/Beyoğlu/Asmalımescit areas when I was still living there even 10 years ago.

woodpanel 8y ago

One has to know that there are trends in urban planning and one of those trends is our current focus on cars being a net-negative to human life and how banning them from cities altogether can only yield net-positives. Clearly this trend is intertwined with the demographic trend of migrating to the urban cores all across the West. So it’s a good thing you‘ve mentioned the Fußgängerzone, which were a trend in the 1950-1970s and German cities adapted them just to find out that they can become a booster of decay, if demographics and economics as well as just the trend don’t hold up (homelessness, empty shopfronts, only elderly folk, unemployed youth hanging around). Fußgängerzonen are largely considered a failed experiment (And because of widespread bombing in WW2 German cities had plenty of room for experiments, which often failed). That they seem to work today, might have more todo with spill over effects from urban population growth, urban revival and a narrow set of datapoints (Fußgängerzonen if plighted areas are often not known to outsiders).

Vinnl 8y ago

Heck, I've been allowed to get a driver's license for over a decade in the Netherlands, but neither I nor my partner has one. Granted, most of my friends to have one, but almost none of them have a car. It helps that we live in a large city, and one that actively discourages driving and encourages public transport and cycling (even by Dutch standards), but not only is it not necessary to drive, it's often the worst transportation option.

vanderZwan 8y ago
Fellow Dutch person, mid thirties and no driver's license here either. With the exception of moving between apartments I have never really felt like I missed it
Scarblac 8y ago
I got the license at 35, with kids having a car around often saves a lot of trouble. But we still only use it twice a week or so.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Absolutely, I expect to be doing the same if I ever do have kids. Primarily for e.g. holidays and such, I think.

em3rgent0rdr 8y ago

> "The public transportation there was amazing" My view is that public transportation in a lot of European cities are great because the cities were built for pedestrians, not cars. It is not the public transportation that makes cities practical without a car. Rather it is cities accessible without a car that makes public transportation practical.