5 ms·

This has been going on in Guadalajara (México) for like 10 years or so (before the pandemic). It got so big that at one point the city decided to close some of

This has been going on in Guadalajara (México) for like 10 years or so (before the pandemic). It got so big that at one point the city decided to close some of the main roads every Sunday, making them exclusive to pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, or whatever-thing-that-is-not-a-car.

wrnr 5y ago
Sort of the same thing happens in SE Asia traffic but then they drive scooters, it looks messy but if you are part of the swarm it feels very natural.
AshamedCaptain 5y ago
But that is exactly what is happening here -- that they are closing the roads where these people are biking, on morning commute rush hour times. Otherwise the story is just "kids go to school on bike".
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  During rush hour, we're in a hurry to meet other people and serve them. So we're trying to optimise for time, and that's right, we should go to work! On the way home though, if we optimise for connectedness by being willing to stop and pick up litter on the way, the whole city will be clean! This idea didn't actually came from me. It was UncleBob - Expecting Professionalism that our wonderful manager Michael chose at work on 2021-08-09. I bike to and from work every day, so decided to apply the "clean as you go" philosophy to every area of life, to love my neighbours the trees, birds, eels, snails. And it's brought a lot of "thank you"s, which multiplied happiness :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSaAMQVq01E&t=2021s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSaAMQVq01E&t=2021s
jolmg 5y ago
I thought that was because of a lacking density of parks in the city.
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  What is the optimum density of parks in a city? A possible suggestion is to change our metric for success from financial gain to connectedness. For city planning, like everything else, that could be achieved using a Sierpiński triangle: lots of space in the middle (with walking & bike paths) and high-density on 3 sides. Are there any SimCity players here who could simulate this for us? Whether the city is willing to re-zone accordingly is the bigger question. I pray that San Francisco's leaders will re-zone before the earthquake does it for us.
  - vanilla_nut 5y ago
    I would think that for optimal citizen mental health, you want something like a honeycomb: citizens should ideally have 2 parks within walking distance of their homes where they can get outside, relax, enjoy nature. Similar principles apply for coffee shops, grocery stores, bars, and many other amenities: you can get by with one within walking distance, but you ideally want at least two options to insulate against closures, times when one is closed or too busy, or in the case or parks, when a large event, like a public market or a concert, is happening in one. I can say from experience in NYC: Central Park is nice, but one giant park for a large chunk of manhattan is not ideal. Works fine for UES/UWS, who have other park options on the island coast. But the section down near Midtown is miserable. And “parks” in the rest of the borough often don’t even have accessible grass (it’s fenced off, as if it was a garden or something). There are problems in my current city, Denver, as well. But parks are very pleasantly pockmarked around the city to give residents options. Now if only they’d close off the biggest park to car traffic…
    - peterburkimsher 5y ago
      Good idea! Honeycombs are hexagons, and they tile the plane. And they're made of triangles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY We need parks, not car parks! Rather getting zapped on power lines or pooping on cars, the birds can have branches to sit in and flower beds to fertilise.
blacksmith_tb 5y ago
I think that's a little different, a ciclovía[1]. We have them here in Portland OR, one weekend a month in the summer. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclov%C3%ADa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclov%C3%ADa
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Sure, the thing is that it started as civic movement aimed at 'reclaiming' the streets from cars, which was very similar to what OP posted. Eventually it got quite large, i.e. thousands of people on each gathering, and it became some sort of peaceful rally that happened every week. In the end, the govt. had no choice but to concede them certain things like ciclovías, cycling roads, legislation, etc. I lived in the city for a while and let me tell you, it is AMAZING to have all that much space just for walking around, talking, having coffee, whatever, even if it's only for one day a week. I want to emphasize on the scale and impact of said project, it is ~30 km of roads that are completely closed for cars for the whole day. The roads that close are (check this out!) the most important ones, running through the middle of the city. At the beginning, people were worried that this would have some negative effect as, you know, the main roads would be completely closed; but today, a decade later, there have been zero negative consequences for that. Most people that live nearby just run their errands walking because they know they can't use their car anyway. Cars are not as important as people seem to believe and I would argue that they're more harmful as a whole than if they weren't there at all. I am super thrilled about projects like -> https://culdesac.com/ https://culdesac.com/, hopefully I can retire to a place like that.

wrnr 5y ago

Sort of the same thing happens in SE Asia traffic but then they drive scooters, it looks messy but if you are part of the swarm it feels very natural.

AshamedCaptain 5y ago

But that is exactly what is happening here -- that they are closing the roads where these people are biking, on morning commute rush hour times. Otherwise the story is just "kids go to school on bike".

peterburkimsher 5y ago
During rush hour, we're in a hurry to meet other people and serve them. So we're trying to optimise for time, and that's right, we should go to work! On the way home though, if we optimise for connectedness by being willing to stop and pick up litter on the way, the whole city will be clean! This idea didn't actually came from me. It was UncleBob - Expecting Professionalism that our wonderful manager Michael chose at work on 2021-08-09. I bike to and from work every day, so decided to apply the "clean as you go" philosophy to every area of life, to love my neighbours the trees, birds, eels, snails. And it's brought a lot of "thank you"s, which multiplied happiness :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSaAMQVq01E&t=2021s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSaAMQVq01E&t=2021s

jolmg 5y ago

I thought that was because of a lacking density of parks in the city.

peterburkimsher 5y ago
What is the optimum density of parks in a city? A possible suggestion is to change our metric for success from financial gain to connectedness. For city planning, like everything else, that could be achieved using a Sierpiński triangle: lots of space in the middle (with walking & bike paths) and high-density on 3 sides. Are there any SimCity players here who could simulate this for us? Whether the city is willing to re-zone accordingly is the bigger question. I pray that San Francisco's leaders will re-zone before the earthquake does it for us.
- vanilla_nut 5y ago
  I would think that for optimal citizen mental health, you want something like a honeycomb: citizens should ideally have 2 parks within walking distance of their homes where they can get outside, relax, enjoy nature. Similar principles apply for coffee shops, grocery stores, bars, and many other amenities: you can get by with one within walking distance, but you ideally want at least two options to insulate against closures, times when one is closed or too busy, or in the case or parks, when a large event, like a public market or a concert, is happening in one. I can say from experience in NYC: Central Park is nice, but one giant park for a large chunk of manhattan is not ideal. Works fine for UES/UWS, who have other park options on the island coast. But the section down near Midtown is miserable. And “parks” in the rest of the borough often don’t even have accessible grass (it’s fenced off, as if it was a garden or something). There are problems in my current city, Denver, as well. But parks are very pleasantly pockmarked around the city to give residents options. Now if only they’d close off the biggest park to car traffic…
  - peterburkimsher 5y ago
    Good idea! Honeycombs are hexagons, and they tile the plane. And they're made of triangles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOifuHs6eY We need parks, not car parks! Rather getting zapped on power lines or pooping on cars, the birds can have branches to sit in and flower beds to fertilise.

blacksmith_tb 5y ago

I think that's a little different, a ciclovía[1]. We have them here in Portland OR, one weekend a month in the summer. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclov%C3%ADa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciclov%C3%ADa

moralestapia 5y ago
Sure, the thing is that it started as civic movement aimed at 'reclaiming' the streets from cars, which was very similar to what OP posted. Eventually it got quite large, i.e. thousands of people on each gathering, and it became some sort of peaceful rally that happened every week. In the end, the govt. had no choice but to concede them certain things like ciclovías, cycling roads, legislation, etc. I lived in the city for a while and let me tell you, it is AMAZING to have all that much space just for walking around, talking, having coffee, whatever, even if it's only for one day a week. I want to emphasize on the scale and impact of said project, it is ~30 km of roads that are completely closed for cars for the whole day. The roads that close are (check this out!) the most important ones, running through the middle of the city. At the beginning, people were worried that this would have some negative effect as, you know, the main roads would be completely closed; but today, a decade later, there have been zero negative consequences for that. Most people that live nearby just run their errands walking because they know they can't use their car anyway. Cars are not as important as people seem to believe and I would argue that they're more harmful as a whole than if they weren't there at all. I am super thrilled about projects like -> https://culdesac.com/ https://culdesac.com/, hopefully I can retire to a place like that.