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Berlin’s Popular Shopping Streets Will Go Car-Free
- munk-a 7y agoHooray! In my locale (Vancouver BC) we've slowly watched the city deploy more of those fake on-road-patios onto the main commercial street here and I'm hoping we'll just shut down car traffic soon since, honestly, if you're driving in downtown you're doing it wrong.
- soperj 7y agoWish Victoria would do the same, but they're very pro-car here.
- notatoad 7y agoi've been told by people in the planning office (in my town, not vancouver) that that's the main purpose of those on-street "temporary" patios - to get people used to the idea that streets are public spaces, not thoroughfares for cars.
- chrisseaton 7y agoI don't even understand why anyone is driving down a road like that in the first place. Where are they coming from and where are they going? Where are they planning to park when they get there? They surely aren't parking outside individual shops? I can understand taxis, delivery vans, busses, chauffeur cars, disabled people, but when I see a private individual in a small cheap car driving through the very centre of somewhere like London I can't think of any explanation for that whatsoever. I wouldn't attempt to drive through a major city unless my life depended on it. Even if you were radically pro-car there doesn't seem to be any logical explanation as for what these people are doing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ilikehurdles 7y agoSide-point -- In many towns across Europe, delivery vans also will have restrictions on when and where they're allowed to make their deliveries. I also agree with you. It is very frustrating to drive in these shopping districts and old town squares. I never understood why my FIL would always want to drive in Manhattan given how much longer it took to get around and how much more the parking cost.
- tacomonstrous 7y agoThere is a ridiculous amount of free parking in Manhattan (and most of NYC) if you've got the time to look for it. It's a little obscene, because the city is leaving a massive amount of money on the table to appease its driving population.
- positive_future 7y agoHow do you know the city is leaving money on the table? Increased economic activity due to people looking for free parking may well surpass losses from parking fees. If the possibility of free parking exists, people well may come out more, or spend more when they are out, and via taxes the city will certainly be earning something. It's probably impossible to measure exactly, but I think it's far from a given that NYC is losing money by providing some free parking.
- L_Rahman 7y agoHere’s some very straightforward evidence for you: compare the cost of using the parking space to either the price of equivalent square footage in neighboring building or a private parking garage on the same street.
- adrianN 7y agoDon't forget that neighboring buildings have several stories, you need to add the appropriate multiplier.
- myspy 7y agoMostly just coming through to drive to work or buying groceries at a larger supermarket.
- ben_w 7y agoIf there are any large supermarkets in Friedrichstraße, I’ve missed them. Medium and small, sure, but not large or huge — those are elsewhere in the city. Likewise for commuting, the U-Bahn and the ironically underground S-Bahn is more reliable in that area than the surface traffic (including busses) because there’s too much surface traffic and therefore jams.
- middus 7y agoS-Bahn means Schnellbahn, not Straßenbahn - so it's probably not ironic.
- kgwgk 7y agoFun fact: “The term S-Bahn was until 14 March 2012 a registered wordmark of Deutsche Bahn, where at the request of a transportation association the Federal Patent Court of Germany ordered the wordmark to be removed from the records of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office.[9] Prior to the said event Deutsche Bahn collected a royalty of 0.4 cents per train kilometer for the usage of the said term.“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-train#Etymology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-train#Etymology
- jen20 7y agoTIL: I thought it meant Stadtbahn.
- luckylion 7y agoBerlin's public transport is notoriously bad (imho), a lot of it is owed to being divided for decades and the rest is just Berlin not taking care of it. Personal transportation is a much better alternative for many routes time wise, and hard to ever beat comfort wise. There's a lot of commercial parking available, and it's not that expensive either.
- kayoone 7y agoI know a lot of expats living in Berlin who are all impressed by the public transport. Granted, they are mostly not from Europe and I personally also prefer to take the bike whenever I can, but it's far from "notoriously bad".
- choeger 7y agoOp is right, though. The PT in Berlin is certainly quite large and offers quite some options on paper. But it is notoriously crowded, unreliable, and sometimes just plain slow. Edit: forgot to mention dirty and often unsafe.
- tilolebo 7y agoCrowded: no, you can almost always find a place to seat. Paris PT is crowded, not Berlin's. Unreliable: true for the S-Bahn, outages are frequent. All things considered, it's still better than all other big cities I have visited.
- Narretz 7y agoWhat do you mean by unsafe?
- choeger 7y agoUBahn is (surprisingly frequently) used by people that appear to have some kind of mental disorder, yelling at and attacking other passengers, to a lesser extend by what I would describe as wannabe gangs, people under the influence and plain drug criminals. Nevermind that the subway has a lot of strict rules in that regard but Berlin being Berlin they are hardly ever enforced. Just an anecdote: I once witnessed a really large muscular and completely drunk guy attacking an actor that was dressed up as Friedrich II., including what looked like a rapier or small sabre. The situation was definitely unsafe for the actor and (if he would not have managed to protect his rapier, because that was what that drunk guy was after) potentially dangerous for anyone else. Another day I had to interrupt some aggressive youngsters trying to rob other passengers in the middle of the day. When they left it turned out they were armed with knives. Not a fun thing to learn. I notified the subway driver once I got out (the gang was moving from wagon to wagon), but he essentially did nothing to stop them. I have not witnessed such stuff in other cities' public transport. And certainly not in that frequency.
- huehehue 7y agoEvery day, I ride the NYC subway over the Williamsburg bridge. I can look out at the traffic a few feet away and see hundreds of gridlocked cars with no passengers (other than a driver). I think it's coming from both sides -- there's an entire industry that sells car ownership as a lifestyle, and on the other end people think driving is a constitutionally protected right. If you think people are using logic, I encourage you to sit in on a bike lane proposal meeting.
- cotelletta 7y agoDrivers are also often unaware how much time they lose on the last mile, whereas a bike can be parked nearly everywhere, and pedestrians just walk up and in. Living in a north american city, it was insane how much faster I could get to places compared to drivers in a 10 min window.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoDrivers are very much aware of how much time they spend in their cars. However you can safely presume that for whatever reason, they’ve decided that the benefits outweigh the costs. Everybody’s free to decide how they want to live their life, but it’s incredibly condescending to presume that just because somebody makes different choices, that they must be entirely ignorant to their own life experiences. This isn’t coming from somebody who commutes in a car either. My decision to do that has meant some benefits for me, but those come at the cost of other benefits I no longer enjoy.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Arainach 7y agoThese main roads contain the places people want to go. Anecdotally, I was one of these crazy private drivers last year. My hotel was on Friedrichstrasse. I was driving from Munich, and AVIS has a car rental location directly on Friedrichstrasse where I was returning my car: https://goo.gl/maps/HLHKsmBtdcGkE2KZ6 https://goo.gl/maps/HLHKsmBtdcGkE2KZ6 The maps directions routed me straight through Checkpoint Charlie and down Friedrichstrasse, and I got 10 solid minutes of being that tourist who seemingly didn't know where they were going.
- tom_mellior 7y ago> I was driving from Munich That's 4 hours by train or 6 hours by car. The train costs 160 Euros without any reductions. I wonder what you paid for the car rental and fuel costs etc. A random calculator I consulted estimated about 60 Euros for fuel alone. (Much of this is moot, of course, if you did other stuff than just do a single-person straight Munich-Berlin trip.)
- Arainach 7y agoYeah, this was something more like Munich-Salzburg-Dresden-Berlin. I like trains in general, but Germany is sufficiently spread out that cars can still make more sense than in most of Europe.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoThat street (Friedrichstraße) is a major north-south thoroughfare because it connects to the bridge in the north. See https://www.google.com/maps/dir/52.5010589,13.3914406/Friedrichstraße,+Berlin/52.5373091,13.3744063/@52.508615,13.393717,13.21z/data=!4m10!4m9!1m0!1m5!1m1!1s0x47a851dac43e5b55:0xed2cdc371d188cec!2m2!1d13.3894122!2d52.5133866!1m0!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/52.5010589,13.3914406/Friedr... It actually isn't as bad as the photo makes it seem: that seems to be taken with a telephoto lens, flattening a kilometre's worth of traffic into a single layer.
- rlaanemets 7y agoI'm one of these people driving through Berlin city center streets with a car but I only do it once or twice per week to haul something heavy. I have a car because that's how I came to Berlin and the car has been very useful from time-to-time. I would never use it for daily commute as parking is complete nightmare but I would not get rid of it either. Public transport is very good here but I prefer bicycles.
- atoav 7y agoI ended up selling my car and using a car sharing service instead. This had multiple positive aspects: - it was cheaper - I didn’t have to deal with any car related stuff anymore (insurance, maintainance, remembering where I parked, ..) - The cars are usually just close by to where I lived and needed to go, no long roundtrips to get to the car or from the car somewhere else Whether this works depends on the amount of usage – but should your usage decrease, it could be a viable alternative.
- rlaanemets 7y agoThis is definitely the right way to go unless you have a need to take longer trips, outside the country, potentially hauling all your stuff. My life has not been that stable here, I needed to drive abroad some time ago and might need it again. But after some years, I would certanly get rid of my own car.
- atoav 7y agoAs somebody who has once lived next to a major crossroads in a big German city. When I sat at my balcony after wiping a layer of black dust from the table and chair I could witness the daily spectacle of the commuter induced traffic jams. The most surprising finding for me was how rare one could see more than one person in a car. Most of the traffic where you saw more than one person inside was vans with workers of some kind. Regular cars were mostly just the driver with their personal 6m². If cars didn’t exist and we had to come up with a system of individual transportation today, it wouldn’t look anything like a car. And I think one can see that more clearly living in Europe, where most cities weren’t designed with cars in mind.
- lm28469 7y ago> The most surprising finding for me was how rare one could see more than one person in a car Reminds me of :https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CharmingShamelessFrogmouth-mobile.mp4 https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CharmingShamelessFrogmouth-mobile....
- 99chrisbard 7y agoVisual reminder of how much space a car uses on the road. Then you remember parking...
- C1sc0cat 7y agoand what does "small cheap car" have to do with it?
- chrisseaton 7y agoBecause it seems even less likely that they even live there when I see a random small cheap car driving through somewhere like St James in London. And they clearly aren't driving because they love cars because they've just got the cheapest car they could. If they're driving through London in a Bentley then maybe they've got a house with a garage and they have to drive through there because that's where they live, or they really love cars. So they don't live there, they can't be going somewhere in St James as there's nowhere you can park, and they're not driving for pleasure. So what on earth are they doing? Did they somehow pick a route that includes driving through one of the most congested places in the country? Why would you try to do that?
- C1sc0cat 7y agoI take it you don't know that some areas of London have a wide mix of classes with poor people living almost next door to fabulously wealthy ones. It maybe a some one working a late night shift going home or some minimum wage delivery driver working for Just eat etc
- chrisseaton 7y agoPoor people but with enough money to buy a parking space in central London, and a job that also includes the benefit of a parking space? Most rich people don’t have either of those things.
- heyalexej 7y agoLooking forward to this. I've just spent two weeks in Kiev, where they block a large section of Khreschatyk St. (8 car lanes plus very wide side walks) around Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) plus some of the side roads each weekend. It makes for an amazing atmosphere and lots of people come out to socialize, chill, shop etc. and I'm almost certain business is better on pedestrianized days vs. 8 lanes full of cars for no good reason.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoHow do citizens who have limited mobility get around in the area this is enforced in? Huge proponent of these efforts (having experienced car free zones in Spain), but I’m always interested in how accommodations are made for people who have a hard time walking (whether it’s due to age or an ailment).
- ericd 7y agoNot sure if this answers your question, but some of those rascal scooters are pretty fast...
- jdnenej 7y agoSurely they can use those single person electric kart things.
- chantelles 7y agoI've lived in various places in Europe (most recently Eindhoven) with large car-free areas. Car-free only applies to folks who have no mobility issues. The areas are all fully driveable (in the early mornings delivery vans and trucks are all over) usually with electronic pylons or gates as blocks. Folks with mobility issues can drive in. I often hear the question from North Americans - but again, car free is not a punishment but a reward. It is actually safer for folks with mobility issues because there are massive pedestrian areas with limited/no curbs and no cars.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoThey walk... Check Google Maps for some representative distances (i. e. picl some apparment building, then map the route to the next supermarket, doctor's office, etc). You will have a store within 500m for the vast majority of residential buildings, and often within 200m. The closest bus stop should also rarely be farther away than about 150m. Wheelchairs and electric scooters are used almost exclusively by paraplegics, not by, say, elderly people with arthritis. Having far lower obesity rates compared to the US helps. My impression is that car ownership is exceedingly rare among the elderly, below the already low 30% of households owning cars. But these pedestrian areas don't make too much of a difference: they tend to be just single streets, so you can always park on the parallel streets and walk just one block.
- spodek 7y agoI don't know the middle steps, but the end step is everyone wishing they had made the area car-free earlier.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- xref 7y agoAs a former delivery driver I’m curious how shops get shipments of multiple pallets of...everything? Early in the morning are trucks allowed? are the pallets broken down and handtrucked to each shop?
- Semaphor 7y agoPedestrian zones here in Lübeck, Germany: Delivery trucks are allowed between 6 and 8 in the morning.
- reaperducer 7y agoI've seen this in some cities (Vienna, for example), and the bollards are lowered (either manually or hydraulically) in the early hours of the morning so that deliveries can be made. They go back up around 7am.
- WalterBright 7y agoI was in Denmark where they had that. Unfortunately, they'd constantly let through "special" vehicles, just enough to pretty much ruin it.
- jopsen 7y agoIn many smaller Danish towns you _can_ drive on top the shopping streets, but there'll be big signs telling you that it's only allowed for "service/special vehicles". If you get caught there you'll probably get a nice fine. And you can be sure all the pedestrians will make you drive slow. Finally, the road usually has tiles so you don't get in there by accident, nor would you want to.
- WalterBright 7y agoThere were plenty of them driving, slowly, and loudly beeping. Enough so it was simply impossible to walk without constantly having to move over for them. It didn't really work as a pedestrian mall. I've been in other European cities where it did work, i.e. no vehicles.
- gumby 7y agoWhat happened in Barcelona? I read that they are unwinding the superblocks (large, largely car-free zones). Is that correct? I t thought it had gone well.
- the_gipsy 7y agoI heard they did some prototype that ended up being successful once they added some green elements and child playground. http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/es/ http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/es/
- gumby 7y agoThanks!
- RobertoG 7y agoThere was a discussion about that here not so long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20200760
- gumby 7y agoThanks!
- trophycase 7y agoPlease please do this in the US too.
- 99chrisbard 7y agoThat's gonna take a while.. https://granolashotgun.com/2019/05/13/obstacle-course/ https://granolashotgun.com/2019/05/13/obstacle-course/
- Yuval_Halevi 7y agoAs someone who lived next to the main square in Amsterdam I never understood why people choose to drive with a car on the roads that cross the city (if they don't live there/uber/taxi drivers) Main streets in cities should be car-free I'm glad to hear about Berlin decision. For many more to come
- estsauver 7y agoI was about to object, but I think as long as Taxi/Uber/Ride share are allowed in the center it'd be a huge improvement for Amsterdam. Taking a car anywhere inside prisengracht is already an exercise in pain, but opening up the city a little bit more would make the few "dicey" intersections in Amsterdam easier on a bike.
- jdnenej 7y agoWhy should taxis be allowed. They are even worse than personal cars because they spend a lot of time driving with no one being transported.
- robert_foss 7y agoTaxi exemptions make no sense to me either, it would just make life easier for well-off people. Biking or public transit it the answer.
- barrkel 7y agoBikes and public transport work well for people who can afford to live centrally, close to dense transport networks and within range of easy biking. But if you're out socializing, you may be drunk (so unsafe to bike) and late (where transport networks start getting sparse). That's when taxis make more sense.
- dagw 7y agoBut if you're out socializing, you may be drunk (so unsafe to bike) and late (where transport networks start getting sparse). That's when taxis make more sense. Sure, but why does the taxi have to pick you up right outside the club. Most of the time it's not unreasonable to expect people to walk a short stretch to a place where a taxi can pick you up.
- neals 7y agoFun fact: I live in a car-free "downtown" area in Europe. I have to walk 15 minutes to reach my car... but just 5 minutes to the train station. Not complaining though; it's a beautiful walk.
- hannob 7y agoTo put this in perspective: The plan is to do this for a single weekend. And maybe even more putting it in perspective: Berlin's senator of traffic and environment has announced a lot of things regarding "traffic change", new bicycle paths etc. But there's a really huge gap between announcements and what's really happening.
- tnolet 7y agoCorrect. Living in Berlin for 5 years now and do almost everything by bike. Change is extremely slow or non existent. Some stuff is going on in Kreuzberg and Mitte, but it’ Taking ages.
- Faark 7y agoI can think of quite a few streets where one oftthe lanes were converted to bike lanes over the last few years. Still have a hard time believing they had the guts to do this to car owners. Yes, progress is slow. Especially compared to capitalistic endeavours like the recent scooter rollout. Who's it were faster, but also hate the "they are just talking" narrative.
- odiroot 7y agoThat's a pretty much normal outcome of Rot-Rot-Grün government. A lot of populist slogans before elections and not much done after. Also, they decried a "moratorium" on new underground lines, which are very much needed, with the growth of the city. It's especially visible in the North an NW parts. Ironically, Morgenpost wrote today exactly about that: https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article226722951/Berlins-Rot-Rot-Gruen-scheitert-bei-Mieten-Bildung-Verkehr.html https://www.morgenpost.de/berlin/article226722951/Berlins-Ro...
- tjungblut 7y agoExactly, free for a weekend to have a big party. So nothing special around there: every weekend they close one or the other street off to host a festival.
- arrrg 7y agoI also think that there would be many opportunities to do much more, but local politicians often aren’t brave enough. Which I can totally understand, since there will always be very worried people when you propose a change like that. In my small hometown it took construction work and the resulting closure for months of one of the main retail streets with no bad consequences to traffic flow at all to convince local politicians in the 80s to turn that street into a pedestrian only zone (originally it was planned to just open the street back up to traffic). In that way temporary experiments might just be a good idea to demonstrate the worthiness of an idea but I fear that closing something for a couple of days might just be too short. In the beginning these disruptions will always be bumpy and unpleasant, so you probably won’t be able to tell a good change from a bad change within only a couple of days.
- Narretz 7y agoCalling the Friedrichstraße a popular shopping street is not really correct. It's pretty crowded by foot and car traffic because it's close to Checkpoint Charlie and not far from the Brandenburger Tor. But it's not very popular. For normal customers, new soulless shopping malls have been built in other areas. For luxury shopping, people go to Kurfürstendamm. There's a small shopping mall that's 80% empty (Quartier 205 or 206). The idea to close the street for traffic is also to see if it makes it more popular again. But then it should be done during the week,too.
- jasonvorhe 7y agoIt's starting. Finally.
- arianvanp 7y agoFriedrichstraße is not a shopping street by any means. It's probably one of the most desolate places I can think of in the city 'centre' (Berlin has many city centres)
- jhrmnn 7y agoThe official Berlin website disagrees with you, https://www.berlin.de/en/shopping/shopping-streets/ https://www.berlin.de/en/shopping/shopping-streets/. I live in Berlin and disagree too.
- odiroot 7y agoQuite the opposite. Some of the biggest international corporations are located either on it or on side streets flowing into Friedrichstraße. It also attracts a lot of tourists due to historically relevant spots.
- rmason 7y agoIn the sixties it became popular among urban planners, at least in the American Midwest, to have shopping districts ban cars. It did not prove popular, in fact you could say it led to the rise of shopping malls. Most if not all of these car free plazas were torn out. Is history repeating itself in Europe? What happens if everyone moves to electric cars and the pollution problem from car exhaust disappears or is greatly abated in the inner city? Does closing the street off still make sense?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- okusername 7y agoYou should visit Europe once, you'll see that life here is different. Specifically regarding Friedrichstraße: It's in the city center, brimming with tourists. 3 major subway lines have stops there. Few cars drive in there as it is, because you have bigger streets nearby that are better connections. If you still want to go with your car, you just park in a parallell side street, there are even parking garages if you don't want to look for a spot. Having it car free will be lovely for the tourists, cafés and restaurants will put out tables. The same was done in other city centers like Budapest or Vienna decades ago, and it worked out extremely well for everyone involved.
- tialaramex 7y agoMaking cars electric means they don't spew CO2, which is important so that the planet doesn't become uninhabitable (for us) BUT it doesn't actually stop them polluting. Rolling at speed means two surfaces are ground together which will produce tiny particles of stuff that get stuck in your lungs. Which causes a statistically detectable increase in breathing problems, thus a small bump in deaths. Getting rid of motor traffic in city centres mitigates this problem, regardless of whether the cars are ICE or electric. We can't make it go away altogether because rolling fast is very useful - the public transport will be doing it too, but we can significantly reduce it.
- TheCoelacanth 7y agoSurely that has more to do with all the people with money moving out to the suburbs and favoring shopping locations closer to them more than it does with a few streets being closed off to traffic.
- kleiba 7y agoThe (European) city I live close to has done this very step about 30 years ago when their main shopping strip was converted to a pedestrian / bike-only street. However, everytime I go there, the street is still full with cars: delivery trucks that bring the retail goods to the stores (which are not easily accessible otherwise), construction trucks for the apparently constant repairs they're doing on the road, ambulances, etc. Even when most of them are not driving you're still constantly surrounded by (mostly big) vehicles.
- raverbashing 7y agoWell, it's a fact of life, you need those vehicles even when people are not driving (I see a similar situation on the pedestrianized street in my city)
- tom_mellior 7y agoIn Vienna the central pedestrian tourist/shopping streets are open for deliveries until 10:00 or 11:00 in the morning, so if you go there at those times, it's quite chaotic. But then all the vehicles are gone for the rest of the day.
- ckris 7y agoThese days most shopping streets also tends to be closed from traffic for security reasons. So it is probably mostly an organizational issue.
- mcv 7y agoThe interesting part of the story is not so much that Berlin is finally making its main shopping street car-free, but why it hasn't done so before. Dutch cities and towns have had car-free or car-poor shopping streets since as long as I can remember, certainly the early 1980s. It's not unusual even in smaller towns. And Munich shows that car-free city centers also exist in Germany, just not in Berlin.
- jdnenej 7y agoWe have a car free shopping street in Adelaide, Australia. It's fairly nice. I used to work in an office on that street and the one thing I miss that I didn't expect was how fast it was to get around. Now I'm working somewhere else and the places I get lunch from are the same distance away but navigating through the roads means it takes twice as long to walk to where I want to go. It's also just generally ugly and louder at the new place.
- lqet 7y agoGood. Where I live (town of around 250k inhabitants), cars were banned from the main shopping street in the city center in the 1970s. It was an extremely controversial decision. Today it is one of top 15 most expensive shopping streets in Germany and the 9th most visited shopping street [0]. If anyone would propose to again allow cars there, there would be an outcry from the public and the businesses. Before: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Kreuzung_am_Bertoldsbrunnen_an_einem_SSV_Samstag.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Kreuzung... After: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/2017-05-02_Altstadt_%28Freiburg_im_Breisgau%29_18.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/2017-05-... They slowly extended car-free zones during the 80s and 90es. Five years ago, they closed down another major 4-lane street and made it a pedestrian or reduced traffic zone, which was also (again) hugely unpopular, but is now seen as a big success (despite minor controversies which have nothing to do with banning cars) [1]. Before: https://deacademic.com/pictures/dewiki/85/UB_Freiburg.jpg https://deacademic.com/pictures/dewiki/85/UB_Freiburg.jpg After: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Werthmannstra%C3%9Fe_%28Freiburg_im_Breisgau%29_jm57877.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Werthman... (the black building replaced the abhorrent building in the previous picture) [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser-Joseph-Stra%C3%9Fe_(Freiburg_im_Breisgau) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser-Joseph-Stra%C3%9Fe_(Fre... [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platz_der_Alten_Synagoge_(Freiburg_im_Breisgau) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platz_der_Alten_Synagoge_(Frei...
- Proven 7y agoIt's nothing but a new tax on those store owners and people who used to conveniently commute in vehicles.
- Ericson2314 7y ago> At Tauentzienstrasse, the street is wide enough for a more radical makeover. If it’s fully closed for good, it could accommodate cafés and what Germans call “lying meadows”—lawns intended for lounging and sunbathing—in its median. Wow, I was just thinking an hour ago that they should do that to queens boulevard, while crossing it (always very scary).
- Ericson2314 7y agoSo when does this begin? I'm about to go to Berlin for ICFP and would love to stand in a car-free street and imagine all cities were like this.