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Re:If You Can’t Ban Cars Downtown, Take Away Parking Spaces by jacobolus on Saturday June 24, 2017 @12:50PM (#14626267)
I have a very small child, and living somewhere where we don’t need a car to get around is immeasurably nicer than living somewhere with car-centered planning. I can put my son on my shoulders or in a wagon and walk to the park, to the grocery store, to the library, to the post office, to the toy store, to cafés and restaurants, ... and we can smile and wave at all the other pedestrians as we walk along. Compare that to the annoyance of strapping him into and out of a carseat, not being able to interact with him while I’m driving and he’s sitting in the back by himself, and spending most of our outdoor time in parking lots.

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.

Re:If You Can’t Ban Cars Downtown, Take Away Parking Spaces by lazyjones on Saturday June 24, 2017 @01:08PM (#14626353)
> I have a very small child

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.).

Re:If You Can’t Ban Cars Downtown, Take Away Parking Spaces by jacobolus on Saturday June 24, 2017 @01:14PM (#14626392)
I have friends with multiple young children and no nannies who do just fine walking their whole brood around the (urban) neighborhood.

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.

Re:If You Can’t Ban Cars Downtown, Take Away Parking Spaces by Spooky23 on Saturday June 24, 2017 @09:41PM (#14628217)
I grew up in Queens. My mom would drag the three of us up hills and across Queens Blvd to run daily errands.

It wasn't that bad.