9 ms·

Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased

• brenden2 6y ago
  Encouraging people to walk and bike, while also reducing pollution, is a great way to reduce the effect of future health problems. Wish they'd do this in NYC. You could close 30-50% of the streets, convert them into parks, and the only negative impact would be that people have to walk an extra block to get a cab.
• jankotek 6y ago
  > It will take a monumental effort from all Londoners to maintain safe social distancing on public transport This is why we need work from home. Banning cars and forcing public transport is not going to fix the problem!
  • ch4s3 6y ago
    They’re talking about a part of London where many people walk to work anyway. This just gives them more space and eases crowding on sidewalks. Also, not every job can be done from home.
    • C1sc0cat 6y ago
      Walk to work after getting off crowded busses tubes and trains
  • acallaghan 6y ago
    Cleaners, nurses, doctors, retail staff, binmen, utility workers, the building trades, etc. etc. Just because programmers can work from home, doesn't mean everyone can. Programmers should definitely continue to work from home as much as is tolerable
  • gadders 6y ago
    It's also not going to work because Sadiq Khan seems to have badly mismanaged public transport can't seem to run sufficient service such that the few people that do need it aren't all crowded together.
• tazjin 6y ago
  Cautiously optimistic about this! I live in London and expected a swing towards more cars as a result of this (which would be barely manageable). However, there's one caveat here: > Officials said they were working with boroughs to implement similar restrictions on the minor roads they manage within the area Some boroughs (e.g. The City) have historically been very interested in pedestrianising, but others (e.g. Westminster) have fought tooth and nail to ensure that roads are cars-first. I would expect them to put up a fight here, too, so this is probably far from settled.
  • oakesm9 6y ago
    Jay Forman has a really interesting and amusing look at what that London Boroughs are, why they exist, and what's wrong with them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daeB46Z4fjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daeB46Z4fjs
    • Zhyl 6y ago
      Jay Foreman's videos are all amazing. Well researched and incredibly entertaining.
  • chosenbreed37 6y ago
    > Cautiously optimistic about this! I live in London and expected a swing towards more cars as a result of this (which would be barely manageable). Mmm...in theory this sounds good. I wonder if the people that could/cycle aren't already doing it. I have a number of colleagues who live in London. However they're just too far away from the office to be able to cycle let alone walk there. London's a big place. A lot of people use trains and buses to get from the periphery to the centre. I'm not sure cycling or walking is an option for them.
    • dirtydroog 6y ago
      It's quite common for people in the suburbs to get a train into central London and they cycle from there, either on their own fold-up bike or on a Boris Bike.
    • 6y ago
• jeffbee 6y ago
  Hard to imagine people will accept a return to brown air and constant carnage. Most living people have never seen air this clear, or experienced cities so quiet.
  • martopix 6y ago
    The city being so quiet also means that a lot of people aren't there to actually see it.
    • standardUser 6y ago
      Sort of. People aren't very loud. Cars are very loud, especially their horns and the loud beeps from locking/unlocking with a clicker. Amsterdam is a good example of a bustling city that is relatively quiet.
      • andai 6y ago
        I was being kept awake by loud traffic the other day and suddenly realized, in my lifetime, that sound will probably go away, replaced by quiet electromotors -- along with the smell!
        • wffurr 6y ago
          It could be replaced today largely by bicycles. $30,000 electric cars and charging infrastructure not required.
        • duxup 6y ago
          > along with the smell! I grew up in rural US. I took a few trips to Europe and to date the smell of car / bus exhaust reminds me of European cities. It's not a pleasant smell but the memories are pleasant. Weird that in the US I just never associated big cities that I visited here with it as much I did with my trips to Europe.
          • ben7799 6y ago
• ruddct 6y ago
  Compare to NYC, which has no cohesive plan for people movement without public transit. It’s going to be a challenge to come out of this crisis in car-centric American cities. Even a small mode-shift to private cars in somewhere like NYC will cause insane gridlock, air pollution, and quality of life issues. Our cultural dislike of walking and biking is going to make healthy recovery much more difficult.
  • dtwest 6y ago
    Are you saying NYC is car centric? It isn't, that's why it is struggling without public transit. In the vast majority of American cities a large portion of workers drive to work during normal conditions. They already have the road capacity, parking, etc needed. The car-centric American cities are actually much better suited for this crisis than NYC is.
    • ruddct 6y ago
      NYC is quite car-centric by international standards. Compare to London (or Paris, or lots of other places), which in response to COVID has: * Used congestion pricing as a tool to reduce pollution/returning traffic/mode-shift to cars * Shut off large areas of their city to cars * Rapidly built pedestrian/bike networks to accommodate for non-car movement While NYC has: * Indefinitely postponed congestion pricing * Defunded bike safety and public transit improvement initiatives * Not built any cohesive bike or pedestrian systems to encourage non-car transport Of course in pre-COVID times, NYC severely lagged in both pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure/investment, and famously has some of the most expensive public-transit construction costs in the world. re: car-centric cities, agreed that somewhere like Nashville is not going to have these kinds of problems. However, a large swath of Americans live in public transit or carpool-reliant cities (NYC/SF/Seattle/DC/Chicago/Southern California, many large southern cities). Mode-shift to private transit would increase traffic 10-20+% in most of these places, which I think we can all agree is not ideal for pollution, gridlock, parking needs, public health, etc.
      • flipflipper 6y ago
• martopix 6y ago
  Milan is also planning to work on bike lanes at this time (it's very bad for biking as of now)
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• ckastner 6y ago
  The city of Vienna did this with their major shopping artery (Mariahilfer Straße), despite an enormous amount of skepticsm. They closed off all traffic in some parts, and most of all traffic in others (to allow for crucial intersections). Where allowed, traffic is limited to a pedestrian tempo. The experiment was a huge success. Commerce has never been busier. I don't think that the drivers miss the roads, and the biggest skeptics -- the shopowners! -- are the greatest benefactors now. They're extending this concept to further areas now. Promote pedestrian, bike, and public transportation traffic, reduce or eliminate everything else. It's great.
  • pradn 6y ago
    These pedestrianization experiments seem to usually work, and I support them. Does anyone know where they've failed?
    • iso-8859-1 6y ago
      IIRC, it failed in Durham, NC a couple of decades ago. According to the city museum.
• Proven 6y ago
  Car-Free = Inconvenient = 19the Century-Like If you like your public transport, you can keep your public transport. It may not be Covid19-free, but do you want to save the world or not?
• jessaustin 6y ago
  It will take a monumental effort from all Londoners to maintain safe social distancing on public transport as lockdown restrictions are gradually eased. That means we have to keep the number of people using public transport as low as possible. -- Mayor Khan ISTM the way to make distancing possible on public transport is not to keep people off transport, but to increase capacity. If the train runs every 30 seconds, you'll get quite a bit more breathing room than if it runs every five minutes. [EDIT:] I should have noted, since I've never been to UK this is more of a general observation than a specific recommendation. Certainly most transit systems in USA have the physical capacity, if not the operating budget, to run much more often. Any bus system, however, could buy more buses, if social distancing on transit were a priority. Perhaps I am too suspicious but when I hear "don't ride the train" I translate that to "we're getting rid of the train". Probably not happening in London but you could see it anywhere in USA.
  • datr 6y ago
    My understanding is that the lines don't have the signalling infrastructure required to run trains that close together.
  • lhopki01 6y ago
    This supposes there is capacity to increase frequency. For almost all lines in London frequency was already at max. For example the Victoria line trains run every 100s (it's actually harder to get faster than that) at peak times. Despite this the line is always completely packed (often waiting a train or two to get space) at peak times. Similarly on some routes it's a continous line of busses so capacity can't be added there either. Additionally stations that required lifts (elevators) can't increase capacity. Now during Covid capacity was reduced but it's being ramped up again. In London there is physically no way to physically distance people using public transport. The only way it'll be achieved is to get everyone who can walk or bike to work to do so. From my experience only a tiny fraction of the number of people who could bike to work did so. Now the offices are too small to physically distance people anyway so there are issues there too.
    • chosenbreed37 6y ago
• acd 6y ago
  I hope it will be made permanent. As tourist I would like to visit car free cities. For London residents clean air. Modern large cities are incompatible with cars.
• buboard 6y ago
  Easy to do that in the summer, but what happens come winter in a rainy city? The future is in hybrid, low impact remote work, and minimal city traffic. Mass transit and traffic jams belong to the industrial era, should have been abandoned long ago