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Cities have had roads long before there were cars. So many people like to pretend that before "car culture" there were no roads in cities or that before cars th
by pclmulqdq 2y ago
Cities have had roads long before there were cars. So many people like to pretend that before "car culture" there were no roads in cities or that before cars there were no big roads. There were huge roads in cities in the 1800s to accommodate carriages, streetcars, and all the extra people on the road because a 5 minute trip by car takes 20 minutes on foot. Cities in 1000 AD had roads, and a lot of them were pretty damn wide. Ancient Rome was famous for building roads. Roads are not a waste of space. Roads are infrastructure.
- Ar-Curunir 2y agoCars need a disproportionate amount of space for the number of people that they serve compared to every other means of transport. Bicycles, e-scooters, buses, etc serve many more people per square foot compared to mostly empty cars.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoYou can certainly pack more bicycles/e-scooters per square mile, but they also move a lot slower. Not to mention cargo capacity of trucks vs. things like e-scooters. Buses and trains also don't go everywhere. If you banned cars and expanded bus routes to compensate, you would get much less utilization of space for your buses. In other words, buses are dense because other modes of transport allow you to only put a bus route on very common paths. The point still stands, though. The roads that they are complaining about were largely planned and built before cars. Downtown SF had roads that were very similar in size in 1900 as they are in 2025. The roads didn't magically get wider when cars came in. If they weren't a waste of space with no cars, they aren't magically a waste of space now. Many other cities that were built up much later have huge parking lots in their city centers, which are a massive waste of space. Roads, on the other hand, are not.