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Well, part of that non- cramped feeling comes from the fact that it's a city that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than London or NYC. I'm a little bit t
by ACow_Adonis 7y ago
Well, part of that non- cramped feeling comes from the fact that it's a city that's almost an order of magnitude smaller than London or NYC. I'm a little bit torn because honestly, Zurich was one of my least favorite places in Europe: subjectively very sterile and boring.
Fortunately I've been to Zurich, London and Melbourne. Melbourne's inner city streets have good practical examples of all modes (tram, subway/heavy rail/car/pedestrian... limited separated bike priority examples though) as a practical study available in terms of street design and with a larger population, albeit still not as large as NYC or London.
An example of tram priority is available on street views of Collins st and Nicholson st Melbourne with a higher population. But we're still in a country/city with car culture as well.
Local experience here suggests that you still get this weird psychological effect: the number of people who have proclaimed to me the "wasted space" of the street down Collins is staggering, even though i would argue by objective accounts Melbourne CBD compared to Sydney CBD is a visible success story of pedestrian priority, vitality, and design. And when you sit down and actually do the numbers (as in physically count) these 'wasted streets' are moving more people than cars or buses on equivalent roads.
You also get this weird effect of out of towners or suburbanites proclaiming the superiority of buses: which I can't disagree more strongly with, and again point out that the areas with trams are bustling with life, value, density and services (it seems pretty objective to me to say the main problems/ limits is the traffic, not the trams) relative to the areas that many of these critiques come from, and yet there's a ststrange urge for outsiders to "fix" them with suggestions of cars/buses and how there's "wasted space" in the densest and most commercially and culturally successful parts of the city (with little introspective insight that the two might be fundamentally connected in some way).
Plus there's another side benefit: emergency vehicles can actually get where they need to go at all times of the day: rush hour, dead of night, doesn't matter, fire engines and ambulances can drive down these swerving around the trams. Good luck doing that on a non dedicated tram line during peak hour...
- lonelappde 7y agoIt's near tautological that tram is better for people who live and work and sleep at tram stops, and worse for people who don't.
- ACow_Adonis 7y agoTwo things there: I'm not sure that it is tautological. There's a definite "psychology" of lobbying for more car resources and the psychological fury of being "caught behind a tram" or seeing the "wasted space" or a "tram going by ahead of you", but trap the same person in a car at a standstill in traffic with less throughput and the fury disappears and a kind of quiet resentment yet passive acceptance replaces it. Put a motorist behind a tram and it becomes the object of their hatred. Put them in gridlock and the car in front becomes "just a drop in the overall frustrating flow, with the proportional amount of blame". Secondly, back to the "wasted space observation" phenomenon. There's this paradox of space wastage observations in the higher density/high utilisation part of town made by people from low density/low utilisation parts of town. Higher density areas provide and support services that are intrinsically unattainable in low density areas, so it's not immediately apparent that someone outside the high density area is worse off, because they now have a greater diversity of opportunity/facilities accessible even if they live outside the high density area. You can visit and access those services even if you don't live there. Personally, i'd rather live in a Melbourne suburb without a tram than a Sydney one, because the Sydney CBD is comparatively dead/pedestrian hostile. The obvious example is the central business district or downtown. While it's a popular polemical tactic to pit the car drivers against the dense pedestrian core, it's a very "brave" position to argue that denser well-connected areas provide no benefit to those who live outside them. The counter example is the wasted space, neighborhood destruction and bizarrely barren wastelands of some American cities: strip malls, multi lane highways, car parks, etc, and the realisation that they can neither sustain thriving local communities or neighborhoods, but culturally can only be populated with mega-stores and generic chains/stores accessible by mass cars and mass culture.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoIf a tram station in front of someone else's house prevents a hundred cars from needing to drive past man, I'd consider that a net win for everyone.
- testrun 7y agoWhere is a subway in Melbourne?