4 ms·
No thank you. They want to somehow have every single person in a 3 block radius park on the perimeter of that area? And this is somehow supposed to make things
by ars 4y ago
No thank you.
They want to somehow have every single person in a 3 block radius park on the perimeter of that area? And this is somehow supposed to make things better?
I also have zero interest in walking 2 blocks to my car when I need it, nor do I want to carry my items that far from my car.
I especially like: "or reducing the number of parking spaces or the number of traffic lanes, for example—actions that might catalyze bigger, more permanent changes in the future."
Yes, let's make people miserable now, because it might possibly make some change later.
The concept of first make things better seems to have escaped them.
I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars.
Making people miserable is not a viable strategy.
- standardUser 4y agoI'm really tired of motorists decimating our environment and wasting 40,000 human lives every year. But I guess we have different values. For example, having my car less than two blocks from me has almost no value in my view. Maintaining a livable planet and saving human live tends to have a lot of value in my view.
- ars 4y agoThen come up with a better way to get people where they need to go. Making things worse for car owners isn't the right strategy. And BTW, public transport is not good enough, not even in places like NY, you need something better.
- standardUser 4y agoEurope figured this out a generation or two ago. Visit Barcelona or Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Also, I live in NY and public transit here is certainly good enough. Where did you get the idea it is not?
- necrotic_comp 4y agoNY's public transit is not great. It works, but it's dirty, slow and unreliable.
- standardUser 4y agoI use it constantly, never notice the dirtiness (dirty compared to what?), rarely have to deal with late trains and it moves a hell of a lot faster than cars a lot of the time. There's plenty of routes where I don't even bother looking at driving directions/Uber because I know that no car can possibly beat the train. I'd guess you've lived in NY for a long time and have forgotten (or never had to suffer through) how bad public transit is in most US cities.
- weatherlight 4y agoNYC subway system is dirty, lol. I love it, but it's old and dirty. (I live part time in Barcelona and the rest of the time here in NYC. The BCN Metro is very clean by comparison.
- the_af 4y agoPublic transport seems to be top notch in Europe. Walking is also nice for shorter distances. Or bikes.
- stoplying1 4y ago
- wombat-man 4y agoI don't know what this guy is talking about. Subway in NYC has some annoyances but works pretty well most of the time.
- Sankozi 4y agoIt is quite slow compared to other cities with metro I visited. I think mainly due to too many stops. On some parts I got impression than metro platforms take more than 30% of the line fragment which is ridiculous.
- wombat-man 4y agoYeah it can depend. Especially on weekends. Sometimes it just makes sense to take get a ride.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- stoplying1 4y agoOne city, and it's not even that good. Shout out, never seen a +13 flagged into oblivion, I'll take that as a compliment.
- 0x457 4y agoUhm, Barcelona has superb public transport. I would take train and metro in Barcelona over driving in...anywhere because driving in cities sucks.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago> Then come up with a better way to get people where they need to go. It's called walking, biking, transit. These things all work. If you don't wanna walk a couple blocks to your car, sorry but that's not worth killing the planet and your neighbors. Cars have SO many externalities: air pollution that affects climate change, pollution that makes the air less breathable, noise, danger to others, takes up far more space leaving less room for other modes, etc.
- lcpriest 4y agoIt's 1.35m people globally per year and millions more with life altering injuries.
- bluescrn 4y agoBut how many lives are saved each year by the internal combustion engine (or it's electric successors)? Not just emergency services - more mundane things like, getting food and care to the elderly, getting workers and tools where they need to be to maintain infrastructure, produce food, and much more.
- Bakary 4y agoYou could say the same for the horse when the transition to cars happened. We can't just think of the advantages we have now, but what we could get in a more practical system. All of the things you describe could improve in an environment that not based on the car model, but because we live with the latter our outlook is dominated by it and we can't conceive of the alternative anymore than a regular non-Jules Verne citizen in the 1880s can visualize massive clover highway connectors
- bluescrn 4y agoI'm really sick of city-dwellers telling the rest of us how to live. Yes, many city-dwellers can live without a car. But not everyone lives in a city, or has any desire to live in a city (especially during a time of decline and perpetual crisis of one form or another) Those who wage such vitriolic war on the car rarely consider small towns and rural areas, where public transport isn't efficient/practical, where no car often means no job.
- kyawzazaw 4y agoisn't it about "cities" and "urban design" though? so does not apply elsewhere. Not sure why you are feeling this way in this thread.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dylan-m 4y agoLiving outside a city doesn't mean you get to roar through it in your SUV and park a step away from your destination. A city has a lot of important services, but it is also a place where people live, and those people get to make choices that put their community first. But while we're on the topic of rural areas having terrible public transportation, I think that's a really important one. Switzerland has a smaller rural-urban divide (which is really where this whole "war on cars" thing comes in), in part because it is actually practical to move between rural and urban spaces on a regular basis. That isn't because the cities are more driveable, or because they build a highway through Bern: it's because they invested in public transit that actually works. This kind of talk benefits everyone.
- lotsoweiners 4y agoLiving in a city doesn't mean you should try to get suburban workers back in the office to sustain your city.
- monksy 4y agoThere are parking paces on the corners. (They cut the corners so it's not completely square)
- prvit 4y ago> They want to somehow have every single person in a 3 block radius park on the perimeter of that area? And this is somehow supposed to make things better? Very few people in Barcelona own cars. Residents will have access to drop off things, but not parking. > I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars European cities tend to be pretty miserable places for cars by default, for the anti-car advocates it would generally be enough to stop subsidising cars.
- Phrodo_00 4y agoThe point is that some car-friendly infrastructure does make the city worse for everyone not in a car, and that includes on-street parking, surface parking lots, wide streets, driveways in medium to high traffic streets, highways cutting through cities and a lot more.
- integrale 4y agoThe current strategy most places is effectively make people too miserable _not_ to own a car. The idea here is to give those who would prefer not to depend on one (i.e., don’t own one or have one they don’t need to use all the time) a pleasant life, subject to less of the negative side effects of cars.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago> walking 2 blocks to my car It's worth remembering that this two block walk is much more pleasant in a superblock: you're not fighting cars along the way.
- the_af 4y agoThat, and also 2 blocks is a ridiculously short distance. I can't help but form a terrible impression of anyone not willing to walk two goddamn blocks to their car. Even carrying bags or whatever. It's a short walk!
- Gigachad 4y agoAmericans live in a world of drive through ATMs and electric scooters in Walmart. Suggesting people walk at all is apparently unthinkable.
- lotsoweiners 4y agoWhat cars are you fighting? I've been to lots of major cities in the US and Europe and never felt threatened once by cars. You just follow the laws and have a good time. No need to act like there is some conspiracy to keep people off of sidewalks.
- the_af 4y ago> I also have zero interest in walking 2 blocks to my car when I need it, nor do I want to carry my items that far from my car. Wow. Two blocks is nothing. To me this reads as someone complaining they cannot drive a car from their kitchen to their bedroom.
- bluescrn 4y agoTwo blocks is nothing... until you have a car that's fully-laden with heavy/bulky cargo.
- vvillena 4y agoSo... unload, then park? That's how you would do it anywhere you don't have an assigned parking place.
- the_af 4y agoIn some specific cases, I agree. But life should not be optimized for specific and unusual cases. I've transported bulky cargo further than two blocks, by the way. I'd rather suffer in those cases, but keep the streets relatively free of cars for the more common cases, like pedestrian quality of life.
- jjav 4y agoJust last week I bought ~2500lb of lumber to bring home (rebuilding a fence). If I had to park two blocks away and carry that by hand I'd be in a world of hurt.
- AlunAlun 4y agoI suggest, respectfully, that you make an effort to understand the wider context before you make such an aggressive comment. Many people in BCN do not own a car. If they do own one, it is used almost exclusively for getting out of the city at weekends. For journeys within the city, the public transport system is excellent, and the climate lends itself to walking, cycling, and scooters. As such, parking two blocks away is not much of an issue. Finally, as a resident you are still allowed to drive within the superillas to access your building’s car park, if it has one, and also for loading/unloading. The superillas were controversial at first but now they are very popular the people who live within them.
- userbinator 4y agoIndeed, they're really just turning cities into the human equivalent of factory farms. I haven't been to Barcelona but some other cities in East Asia which are like that, and once you get over the novelty, you realise how suffocating it feels to live in such an environment. No thank you indeed; I normally stay far away from the cores of cities precisely because of that atmosphere, and if stuff like this keeps happening to them, it looks like I'll remain so for the forseeable future.
- jjav 4y ago> I'm really tired of anti-car advocates that have just a single idea: Make people too miserable to use a car, and maybe then there will be less cars. Agreed. Trying to drive change by making others miserable is hardly ever a winning strategy. Instead, we need to make it easy, convenient and fun to both get around without a car and to reduce how far one needs to go in day to day situations (i.e. have lots of small shops near housing). That will make many people prefer to not use cars (most people don't actually love driving) and those who want to drive can still do whatever they like but it'll be a much smaller population.
- dang 4y agoWould you please stop taking HN threads into flamewar? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. Not cool. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cool_cat2 4y ago