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The car free idea is great, but this looks like it's inevitably gonna turn into a dystopian nightmare since it's actually cut off from the rest of the city. Th
by asdajksah2123 3y ago
The car free idea is great, but this looks like it's inevitably gonna turn into a dystopian nightmare since it's actually cut off from the rest of the city.
The great thing about good cities is that they make it easy to meet people, but they're also decently large so there are enough sub communities that you aren't forced to conform entirely because you might otherwise get kicked out of the only community available to you. This is a village problem (although villages being far less dense make it easier to hide the non conformist stuff you might be up to).
This development combines the worst of both worlds. It's too small and cut off from the rest of Phoenix to give residents access to a large set of sub communities, and it's too dense to keep your stuff to yourself.
- NeoTar 3y agoHopefully developments like this will encourage the provision of good public transport. Ideally they would be built around transport hubs. A lot of the outer London suburbs originated as basically railways stops in fields, where the suburb grew around the station.
- nightski 3y agoPublic transport is so inconvenient, even in the best cities. Your life revolves around transportation schedules. We walk several miles in our neighborhood every day. Yet we love the freedom a car gives us.
- ZekeSulastin 3y agoThat’s why you ideally have a city with a good public transportation schedule - it’s not like having a car makes your transit planning immune to external factors anyways.
- hef19898 3y agoBecause looking for a parking place is so much better... There are places where a car is nice, or even necessary (sports requiring large equipment for example, trips with the family), and then there is over using cars and building cities that require cars even if it can be done differently.
- nightski 3y agoIn our city of 500k (which is arguably small, but honestly I think it's the perfect size) we never have to look for a spot. There's always free parking available.
- nostrebored 3y agoThe parking isn't free. It's subsidized and comes at the expense of density, walkability, and the opportunity cost of what else could've been built.
- cyrialize 3y agoA great example of this is the size of parking lots for sports stadiums. There's also several stories (I believe SimCity might be one?) of video game developers attempting to make representations of places in their game - and then removing all the parking lots as they realized it would make a boring experience.
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- cyrialize 3y agoMy city is less than half of that size. It's impossible to find a parking spot and parking is only free on Sundays. To make more parking, they'd have to tear down buildings or take away roads. Combined with a poor bus system, it ends up being a bad experience. I'd much rather have a better public transportation system in my city, it'd be much easier than having to tear things down. More people in the city are pushing for this, so hopefully it'll get better.
- NeoTar 3y agoSchedules are irrelevant when frequencies are high enough. If you look at the most successful public transport systems (e.g. in London, Paris and Berlin) trains frequencies are often at least every ten minutes off-peak and can be every two-three minutes in the peak times. At those frequencies you can literally just turn-up and travel.
- nightski 3y agoThis is not true in my experience, Seattle has a pretty solid bus system and we still felt like we were having to plan around them even though they generally would stop every 15 minutes. You could not count on them 100% either. Occasionally they just don't show up. For trains that is great but you still have to get to/from the trains. Heck even bus stops require a 5-10 minute walk some times. So it's the walk to the bus stop, planning if the bus doesn't show up, the transit time which could include a lot of stops, and so forth. It really adds up to a lot of time lost.
- comte7092 3y agoSeattle has a pretty good bus system for the US but a pretty mediocre one globally. When we talk about “frequent enough” 15 minutes is an eternity, honestly it is the bare minimum for what could be considered frequent. Frequent is every 5-6 minutes. I’ve had commutes where the headway was 2 minutes. It doesn’t matter if the train/bus is late or doesn’t show up at that point.
- nightski 3y agoIs there any evidence this works in anything but the largest cities? Because America is built on small towns/cities [1]. [1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nation-of-small-towns.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
- comte7092 3y ago> America is built on small towns/cities There is this really strange mythology that persists around this. America is not built on small towns or cities any more than other countries, in fact it is generally much less so. 80% of the US population lives in urbanized areas. [0] Your citation is counting towns, but that doesn’t reflect the way Americans actually live, and if you think about it, that makes sense, the US can’t have millions of million plus cities. City population size is going to follow some sort of geometric/power law distribution. To answer your question, no one is advocating banning all cars outright. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta... For comparison, look at India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_India?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_India?wprov=sf...
- KptMarchewa 3y agoIn best cities you literally do not care since everything runs frequent enough you don't wait.
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- Gigachad 3y agoEven in average cities like Melbourne, you don't have to know a schedule at all. Trains run every few minutes most of the day. You just show up and get on.
- jillornot 3y agoI have found the opposite. Tokyo, Kyoto, Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, all of them public transportation was way way WAY more convenient than a car. Lived with a car the first 16 years of my adult life followed by 16 years no car. The no car years were better. Now I live in SF with car. SF might be considered to have good public transportation by many in the USA but it's shit compared to those other cites and it's not convenient. It's really only useful if you live really close to one of the tram lines. Further, in those other cities, public transportation is clean and something everyone uses. In USA cities outside of NYC, public transportation is largely considered a service provided to those too poor to own a car. As such it's always shit.
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- slothtrop 3y agoYeah considering that we know it's possible to have walkable neighborhoods and cities without being outright hostile to vehicles (see: Japan), I don't see much value added.
- JTbane 3y ago>The car free idea is great, but this looks like it's inevitably gonna turn into a dystopian nightmare since it's actually cut off from the rest of the city. This kind of thinking makes no sense, you can have public transit (or even private taxis and bus lines) that fully solves this issue. Heck, many NJ beach towns have private "Jitney" lines that do well.
- ProcNetDev 3y agoOwning a personal car and mobility are different things. You can meet people and hang out with them, without owning a car.
- jeffbee 3y agoIt’s cutoff from what now? It’s smack downtown and has a light rail station.
- lotsoweiners 3y agoDefinitely not downtown. It is very close to the 101 and an almost 3 mile walk to Mill ave.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoMany of the proposals I've seen for car-free neighborhoods in the US have parking at the edges. You can't drive to your house, but you can drive to a parking structure 1000 feet from your house.
- dingnuts 3y agoLet me just tell my disabled wife that she has to walk a fifth of a mile to the house after she parks, she'll love that on the days when the fatigue is bad or her feet feel like pins and needles. God forbid we have the absolute luxury of parking by the door.
- femiagbabiaka 3y agoThat’s definitely a concern. Considering that 60% of all car trips in the US are less than six miles, the goal would be to provide alternatives so she doesn’t have to drive. Unrelatedly this is actually the irony of the 15 minute cities fracas in my mind: america is already full of fifteen minute towns. 15 minutes from leaving the door to your destination in a car. That kind of thing can feel freeing, but it is really a prison that ties you to making money if you want mobility. In contrast I see older folks and disabled folks moving around all the time in my walkable city with ok transit. Their mobility still requires money, but much less money.
- bryanlarsen 3y agoThen just don't live there? It's not for everybody and that's OK; nobody's forcing you to live there. Fewer cars on the road will make the roads emptier and more usable for the people who do have to use cars.
- pchristensen 3y agoHow is it cut off? It's right in the middle of Tempe, and adjacent to a light rail stop.
- lotsoweiners 3y agoI’d say it’s more at the edge of Tempe. Google maps tells me it is a 2.7 mile walk to the start of Mill Ave.