All for what? The whole downtown area is walkable, and there is a perfectly good multi-level garage at the edge of Main Street for people to park in.
> This is a massive reduction of comfort, a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
Parents don't need to drive up right to wherever they're going; their children could do with a little walk. I've got a four year old, and we go downtown every weekend. It's no problem to park in the garage and walk half a mile to where we're going. At the same time, it's a big worry to have kids running around with traffic zooming by.
Deliveries and disabled people can be accommodated by permitting busses, special vehicles for the disabled, and commercial deliveries during certain windows. You don't need to permit all vehicle traffic to accommodate those special cases.
Just as we have shopping malls with outlying parking surrounding a pedestrian only area, you can engineer urban cores with appropriate pedestrian infrastructure, that are served with a network of transport modes outside of the core, including transit and garages.
Downtown? It's easy: they're noisy, annoying, polluting, take up space, and designing a city for them results in urban and suburban wastelands as opposed to vibrant, walkable city centers.
>This is a massive reduction of comfort
Well, comfort is not everything. And for obese car-obsessed sedentary people "a massive reduction of comfort" might just what the doctor ordered!
>a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.
And yet, families with small children and businesses have been doing just fine in more traditional and not car-oriented cities.
As for people with disabilities, they can always use mechanized wheelchairs and disability friendly public transport (something car and private-transport obsessed cities usually lack, only allowing the richer disabled people those "comforts").
That's simply no longer true with EV.
> And yet, families with small children and businesses have been doing just fine in more traditional and not car-oriented cities.
In those fabulous city centers? Sure! Full of families with small children they are... ;-)
Also, EVs are still noisy because a significant part of the noise of a driving car is produced by the tires, unless driving very slowly.
EDIT: Also, judging from the tone of your last statement, I'm going to guess that you've never been in Europe.
Perhaps you live in a different Europe then, I've lived in Vienna for the past 27 years.
Which all of 5% of the population or less have.
>In those fabulous city centers? Sure! Full of families with small children they are... ;-)
Ever been to Europe?
Yes, pretty much all my life.
Check out who actually lives in city centers here. Elderly people, rich businesspeople without families etc. ...
In Vienna, where I live, the city center has the following demographics:
- 104m² average flat size, housing 1,89 people.
- 32% population over 60 (highest in Vienna's districts), average age 46,3 (vs. 40,5 for all of Vienna)
- 2,3% of the city's population live there, but only 0,7% of its children (and 2,5% of its cars)
Downtown can also be more expensive than peripheral districts, so older people are more likely to afford housing there. That's not because of less cars though.
But for our purposes, Vienna with all its districts, not just the center, is still far less car oriented than the traditional US city and its suburbs.
>2,3% of the city's population live there, but only 0,7% of its children
Just considering all as single-kid families would account for 2.3% "of the city's population" living there but only 1.5% of its children. And tons of families have only one kid (but of course 2 parents, divorced or not), lots have no kids, and tons of adults are not married yet. Add immigrants (who are more often than not male who come to seek work and don't bring children), and one would expect adult populations to be larger than children population in the same area.
Knowing that it's possible to comfortably get around the city without a car, these citizen can't help but notice how much their quality of life is lessened by people insisting on cars.
- Emissions, known to cause premature death, and often exceeding the guidelines, especially in summer
- Traffic accidents
- About 2/3 of the area of public streets being required for cars (two pedestrian walkways, two lanes parking, two lanes traffic)
Even without completely eliminating cars and trucks, which you would probably still need for deliveries, emergency services and disabled people, you could reduce most roads to one lane, and get rid of traffic signals. That would:
- Greatly increase the speed of biking (currently, 1/2 of the time is spent waiting for signals or in traffic)
- Increase the speed of busses even more (they spend more time waiting in traffic that bikes can pass)
- More than double the available space for wider sidewalks, greenery etc.
Beyond that, the poor, disabled people, the elderly, and children between the ages of about 5–18 have a much better time living somewhere that they can be independently mobile instead of needing to rely on someone else driving them around.
One is easily manageable, but consider families or single parents with 2-3 small children and the amount of stuff they need to carry with them, buy when shopping etc. ...
Not everyone can afford to move to expensive suburbs or hire a nanny.
I live on the outskirts of a larger-sized european city with perfect public transport and still prefer my (electric) car, since it's so much faster, cleaner, safer and more comfortable. I'd use it much less if I lived in the city center, but it'd still be a reduction in living standards (carrying shopping bags 500m vs. perhaps 100m total etc.).
You can easily carry quite a lot of shopping bags for 2 or 3 kilometers in a wagon if you need to.
Or if you like, you can use a car occasionally for shopping trips (or even a taxi), and for a workday commute and the great majority of other trips, stick to walking/transit/bikes. Even if people just ditched their cars for 80% of their trips it would make the city overall much more pleasant.
It wasn't that bad.
I don't think everywhere needs to look like or support the activities of dense urban cores. But I do think dense urban cores should look like and support the activities of dense urban cores.
In America even this is controversial and difficult to achieve.
That's assuming that you can "go green" in any meaningful way with a significant share of motorized private transport. Electric engines might emit fewer pollutants and CO2 than ICEs while operating, but it would take quite some advancements in battery tech to produce the required battery packs without CO2 emissions that are about as significant overall. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608959
As far as the environmental impact goes, it's always much better to replace trips taken by car with trips taken by bike or by foot (or, to a certain extent, by public transit) than to just replace one type of car by another.
It's all about balance...
As you get your way and the richest drivers lose their transport options, pressure on rents in walking distance from offices will skyrocket.
Middle and working class suburbanites, who don't have that option, are simply screwed. You propose to make cities exclusively for their urban residents, fuck anyone who needs a car to keep their travel time reasonable. Maybe some middle class people will be willing to suffer through on buses to visit occasionally.
(Good public transit like rail just becomes an extension of the city, and living near it becomes as unaffordable as living in the city center. Only shitty transit is accessible from affordable housing).
Raise height limits. We can address those who are drivers by choice (rather than economic necessity) once a below-median family can comfortably afford 3 bedrooms in a high-rise near transit.
What other useful space would you put between tall buildings? Pedestrians have plenty of space to walk, at least I don't hear much about pedestrian traffic jams.
Roads are very valuable and they're being used for many things that everybody needs: buses, ambulances, fire service vehicles. Do you really want them gone?
And, yes, pedestrian traffic jams do happen. There's also untold other costs of traffic, and potential uses for more space:
- Outdoor dining
- retail displays
- kids playing
- Trees, bushes, etc
- Bike lanes
Outdoor dining can be done in backyards (pretty much every 2nd tavern in Athens, a big, sprawling, dirty city) does this.
Retail displays - pardon me, how many more do you need and why do they need to be in everyone's faces in the middle of the street?
It seems that millennials don't really know what they want and aren't flexible enough to choose from available lifestyles in different cities, countries etc. - instead, they what everything together immediately right in the place they live, no matter how contradictory those things are. If you want trees, go to a park. Kids can play there safely, too, without being run over by an ambulance or biker. ;-)
Wake up, "cars" is no longer synonymous with "pollution". I take offence at such ignorance as an EV owner.
As for kids who want everything while condemning capitalism: the problem isn't that they want clean air and play time, the problem is that they demand just as vigorously warm pizza delivered to their home in 10 minutes, furniture brought to their doorstep by whoever sells it on Amazon and the fire brigade to arrive quickly when they set their WLAN-enabled fridges on fire. Obviously, they don't understand how these things relate to each other, but they moan about it nevertheless.
You could eliminate half of roads and still have ample room for emergency services.
Suggesting that there might be a better way than today's status quo is different than saying that certain people don't deserve to exist.
If you actually think something more nuanced, I'm glad to hear it, but I have no idea how anyone is supposed to glean that from the comment you actually wrote
[link goes to UN website] https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/outcomedocuments/agend...
Since when is an urban lifestyle one devoid of cars? It's you who should move to a small village, where people used to walk everywhere. Large cities were always busy with horse carriages, cars and other means of private transport.
You can improve an area by seperating incompatible uses. When white flight was in full swing in the 1970s, cities removed pedestrian plazas, bulldozed marginal real estate and created parking lots in the name of urban renewal (and enriching speculators), etc.
In my area, a few cities have selectively closed streets for events or permanently closed streets to create pedestrian zones. It's largely been successful in attracting more visitors and creating a good environment.
That's great! How do they deal with Li-Ion batteries in the cold? I imagine it'd be similar to what you'd do before—turn on some lights and the radio to get some juice flowing before you try starting the engine.
There seems to be a second movement hidden behind the climate debate and it's keen on removing private transport altogether (except bicycles, for now), apparently driven by people with a particular urban hipster lifestyle. This is a massive reduction of comfort, a burden for families with small children and people with disabilities, as well as businesses and logistics.