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GCN, a cycling channel, just released a video on the car-centric thinking that we all have been forced into over the past century https://www.youtube.com/watch?

by TomK32 2y ago

GCN, a cycling channel, just released a video on the car-centric thinking that we all have been forced into over the past century https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4GZnGl55c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_4GZnGl55c It took me years go get into a thinking that mobility should be the priority, not cars. Once you do this mental step you can think about who needs mobility but for whatever reason cannot use a car (too young, too old, drunk, etc) and how streets and cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars to make them safer for what many call an indicator for a good cycling infrastructure: women (with kids) on bicycles.

globular-toast 2y ago
It's a great video and better than the article imo. Any talk about walking or cycling that doesn't talk about cars is completely missing the main reason people don't want to do those things. The video talks about "motonormativity", a phenomenon where even people who don't drive will defend and justify car usage. Cars need to get out of town centres. Roads need to be redesigned to put pedestrians first and motorists last. Unfortunately you can't just make big changes these days so any attempts use the boiling the frog approach. Tiny changes that will take decades to get anywhere. For example, in the UK now pedestrians have priority at T junctions. This is the law. Good luck exercising that priority, though. It would be much easier without the type of junction shown in that video.
- TomK32 2y ago
  It is a long process, it was in the Netherlands (where it started with campaigns about the number of children killed by drivers (others might say cars, but there's a person driving the car) but will be faster for every other city. I envy Paris for the massive change in a quick time, here in Austria is a fight street after street with cars still cutting through the old town.
- Hugsun 2y ago
  I don't think it's fair to compare the article to the GCN video. Strongtowns has been advocating against all the issues mentioned in the GCN video for years. This article is just making one argument that aligns with the broader idea of urbanism. It's not meant as a general introduction to the movement like the video.
akira2501 2y ago
> Once you do this mental step you can think about who needs mobility but for whatever reason cannot use a car (too young, too old, drunk, etc) Then you need to take the mental step of thinking about all the people who require a car for mobility. People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped. > cities need to be redesigned to slow down cars A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur. Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road?
- LeChuck 2y ago
  A city designed for other modes of transport is also better for drivers because only those who need (or really want) to drive need to do so. Result, less congestion and more relaxed driving. If you have 15 minutes to spare, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
- piva00 2y ago
  > A mode of accident that sometimes occurs is a car rolls down a hill then causes a fatality. We'll have to redesign cities to remove any elevation changes, and we should seriously consider just banning driving at night, as that's when the overwhelming majority of pedestrian fatalities occur. That's a rather odd edge case, and seems to be much more prevalent in the USA than in other developed countries, and probably exactly because everyone depends on a car that you end up having old shitboxes barely functioning because someone is 100% dependent on that shitbox to live their lives. A car rolling down a hill is probably less than 1% of all car-related accidents in your country. > Meanwhile, instead of punishing cars for simply existing and providing good utility to the city, why not just build better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road? Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets, design streets sharing different transport modals so cars slow down. It works everywhere else, why is the USA so special that it won't work in American cities? No one is talking about removing cars altogether, the discussion centers around making streets in cities safer for everyone, no driver wants to kill people, no one on a bike or on foot wants to be killed. There's absolutely no need for cars to go over 30-40km/h in city streets, any need for higher speeds demand infrastructure separating transport modals. Please, spend some time in a nice walkable city (some time = weeks to months). The difference is absurd. I'm originally from São Paulo, a city that follows the exact playbook from American cities, it's fucking hell with traffic, moving to Europe and experiencing how nice cities can be made me a hard advocate for changing, I like cars but they shouldn't have priority over everyone else inside a city...
RhysU 2y ago
[flagged]

JoshTriplett 2y ago
The post you're responding to talks about having "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", and your response is saying "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets" and "infrastructure separating transport modals". Both of those are making the same case. > Why do cars need to have fast lanes inside a city? To get from point A in a city to point B in a city in a timely fashion. That doesn't mean that needs to happen on streets shared with pedestrians, but it needs to exist, and it needs to have some way of reaching the same destinations.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport not cars. With cars you'll get more traffic and the fast road will become slow. Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing that will act promptly to the button press to switch to green for pedestrians.
  - JoshTriplett 2y ago
    > Also fast cars are a problem when you need to make a pedestrian crossing The three things I quoted in the post you're replying to were "better pedestrian infrastructure that's actually separate and protected from the road", "Separate that traffic, get the cars out of the way from pedestrian streets", and "infrastructure separating transport modals". You don't need a pedestrian crossing if you have separated infrastructure. For instance, interstates don't have pedestrian crossings. (Some have raised paths where pedestrians can walk from one side to the other without intersecting with traffic.) > To get fast from point a to point b you need public transport That's a lot less fast when the path from A to B involves walking to C, taking transport to D, walking to E, taking transport to F, then walking to B, and taking twice as much time doing so. Even if transportation were instantly available with no waiting when you arrive at each of those points, that's still substantially more inconvenient. And it's a largely fundamental property of public transport that getting from an arbitrary point to an arbitrary point typically involves multiple transits plus walking. (And unfortunately, often the responses to that are some flavor of "we should make cars slower and less convenient" rather than "we should make public transport faster and more convenient and point-to-point".) It's hard to beat direct door-to-door transportation. It's possible, and we can and should get to a point of having that via public transport, but in the meantime let's not pretend that it's always a win rather than a tradeoff.
    - Moldoteck 2y ago
      Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians, that's why many cities in eu are either closing them or doubling them with classic crosswalk and finding out that raised/under paths aren't used anymore since it's much more convenient to just directly cross the road Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting. Imagine each bus/tram has own lane and semaphore priority meaning it'll get close to max speed, imagine thereare lot's of pub transports, imagine the paths for pub transport are shorter compared to car paths again to make pub transport more efficient, imagine parking is limited since land is expensive and youll spend lot of time searching for a spot and it wouldn't be cheap since again land is expensive, imagine in either situation you'll end up spending time in traffic, imagine most of pub transport stations would have bike parking so that you could cover last mile on a bike really fast if you need it You can say that it'll cost a lot of money and time to implement this but in reality it's just a matter of political will. Separate bus lanes and priority semaphores and bike lanes and parking is relatively cheap and easy to implement, just like dynamic parking price. The most expensive part is buying more pub transport units.
      - JoshTriplett 2y ago
        > Separated crosswalks aka raised paths inside cities are terrible for pedestrians I agree, which is why I personally prefer the solution of burying the roads and keeping the pedestrian walkways at what is currently "street" level. That's a major challenge for existing infrastructure, but I've seen more than a few public transportation proposals that have similar "much easier when one from scratch" problems, and I think it's worth designing the ideal before settling for something worse. > Again, properly designed public transport is faster than cars. You are thinking about public transport in current car designed setting. No, I'm thinking about ideal public transport versus ideal car transportation. It's not reasonable to compare the best case of public transport to deliberately worsened car transportation and declare public transport the victor. I would love to have public transport that's actually better than the common case of car transportation, but proposals like what you're describing don't go far enough to get there. I would love to have a world where we have 300km/s trains between every city (major or minor), and automated point-to-point no-transfer underground transportation within cities. And I'd love to see incremental steps in a direction like that. What I don't want to see is "if we make cars much worse, we can have public transit that sucks less but is still worse than cars used to be".

TomK32 2y ago

You probably wouldn't believe it: But we managed to raise our daughter without having a car. She's now a happy cyclist herself. And in regards to handicaps, a few years ago I broke my hip, nothing a few plates and screws couldn't fix but I wasn't allow to step on the right leg for months. But I was allowed to borrow a recumbent trike, moving the bad leg was fine. and I was able to ride it with just the good leg. Needless to say I didn't loose much musclemass in the bad leg as it was constantly in motion. It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up. Did you actually watch the GCN video? Have a look again at the bit about the corners that allow cars to go faster but take away space from pedestrians.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
>It's not about punishing cars for their existence: It's about the massive amount of space they take up. I'm in California. We have a massive amount of space. If civilization collapsed, we could make a walkable state that can probably suit billions if need be. Being more compact isn't a huge priority here. On the contrary, we're trying to develop other suburbs out in the desertous regions.
frabbit 2y ago
We also raised a child without a car -- in North America. It is much more possible than most people claim. I have some sympathy towards people that are arguing about different cost/benefit calculations applying to poorer people in the most motonormative parts of the USA. I don't buy all of it ( I have been poor in the USA and found that a bicycle was the key to freedom ), but I can believe there may be job situations where it just is more practical. The people whose testimony I completely write off are upper-middleclass who could live closer to work with a smaller living space (or other tradeoff) -- we are all going to be burning in their self-justifying moralistic hell in the near future. Get a bike losers -- and use it.
- TomK32 2y ago
  Awesome. On the bikes. There's plenty of variants, not just the regular city bikes or cargo bikes, but also push bikes for adults, here's one German pensioner who actually made a startup out of this and his bikes are also useful to people with certain disabilities https://www.laufrad-fuer-erwachsene.de/ https://www.laufrad-fuer-erwachsene.de/
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  > who could live closer to work with a smaller living space If that’s the necessary tradeoff, of course you’re seeing failure of adoption. Also, would they need to move every time they change jobs (or husband & wife can no longer work on opposite sides of town to continue their careers from before marriage)? Logistics need thought through to be feasible policy.
  - frabbit 2y ago
    Yes, you are articulating perfectly why the pampered, irrational and entitled Western middle-class are and will fail to meet any of the real world challenges we now face. Nothing will change except the climate and then the "husband and wife" can make a rational decision about which of them gets to consume which proportion of the hugely diminished resources. Perhaps the "husband and wife" will regret the recently-vanished mild and predictable climate to which humans spent tens of millions of years adapting. Probably not though: the "husband and wife" are great at not looking physical reality in the eye.

Moldoteck 2y ago

" People with small babies, anyone with urgent medical needs, and the handicapped."- yes, usually all of them will have a more comfortable life in a city that gives priority to pedestrian and bike infra. We are all pedestrians, but not all of us have cars. Disabled ppl in us are living worse than disabled ppl in nl again due to car oriented infra. Having a baby doesn't necessarily means you need to have a car, in a dense area like in NL ppl get by with a backfiets or cargo bike or just are using public transport or taking a taxi/day rental when really needed. Related to car speed- at some point you have intersections of pedestrian and car infra and if the priority is to have a safer area, cars must drive slower, that's why lots of cities are implementing 30km areas+traffic calming like curbs, bollards and bumps and it works and heavily reduces the accidenta while avg speed remains paradoxically almost unchanged because less accidens/dangerous driving means less road blocks. Also, not all areas are wide enough to have everything separated, that's why the shared road concept exists- cars drive super slow and pedestrians and bikes have priority there, ppl can walk in the middle just like cars and cars will need to wait

frabbit 2y ago
> Disabled ppl in us are living worse > than disabled ppl in nl again due to > car oriented infra. Car-centered road and sidewalk design is hostile to wheelchair users, people with sight impairments, children, old people on so many fronts: - noise from vehicular traffic - the right to progess impeded at every block by having to wait until someone drives their horseless carriage - the danger of crossing because the licensing process for the self-propelled horseless buggies does not select only for the reasonable and sane Motonormativity is a loss for everyone except car manufacturers and oil companies. Even the suckers driving them are cheating themselves out of exercise and experiencing the world.
- Moldoteck 2y ago
  It's much much more than that. For example in nl ppl in electric wheelchairs/microcars can use bike paths to drive slowly and safely to their destination. Also due to higher density they aren't far from either shops, cafes, other stuff they may need, everything is close-basically they can live relatively normal lives without relying too heavily on others
  - Hugsun 2y ago
    The Netherlands truly are the promised land of urban design.

bobbylarrybobby 2y ago

Cars are not alive, let alone sentient, so it is no more possible to punish them than it is a rock or a pane of glass. Perhaps you do believe cars are sentient and capable of receiving punishment. But if not, you might have been using “cars” as a de-personifying shorthand for “drivers”. In which case, yes, drivers should be punished — not for merely existing, no, but for the harm they have caused to non-drivers. From traffic fatalities to car-only infrastructure, drivers and their insistence on cars have been to the detriment of the rest of us.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
you want to punish all drivers because some were dumb and reckless? Seems excessive. I'd start with making sure tests are actually tests and not formalities. Then I'd also expand that to needing to re-test every X years, so old people who can barely see or have poor motor control aren't still driving.
- bobbylarrybobby 2y ago
  That's the thing — a driver doesn't have to be dumb or reckless to harm those around them. Merely insisting that society provide space for you to drive and park your car, not to mention all the harms that driving itself causes (CO2, particulate matter, other pollution, noise, ...), is a serious harm inflicted by all drivers on those around them.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    This makes an assumption that everyone is strapped for space. It depends on the geography at the end of the day. >not to mention all the harms that driving itself causes (CO2, particulate matter, other pollution, noise, ...), I fail to see how humans don't do any of these harms on foot. The move towards electric cars should put each other on rough parity.
    - TomK32 2y ago
      Electric cars are still cars that need a lot of space in our cities and run over pedestrians. It's rather sad that the move to electric cars wasn't taken as an opportunity towards smaller cars.
      - rangestransform 2y ago
        in general, you can't convince someone to do the more pro-social action by making their lives worse, you have to meet them where they're at and provide either an upgrade or a side-grade.
- TomK32 2y ago
  Did you know that of the car drivers & passengers killed each year, about 25% (and the difference between the US, UK or EU is pretty small here) didn't put on a seat-belt before their last drive? Of course this number will eventually go down, but it seems there's a lot of dumb drivers out there.