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Re:We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016) by yongjik on Thursday June 28, 2018 @02:41PM (#17419388)
> The distance from a car door to a shop is a good ten minutes, so she simply doesn't go there. She goes to out-of-town supermarkets with disabled bays right near the entrance.

...which is rather ironic, considering "ten-minute walk from parking lot to shop entrance" is an almost unique American suburban problem: we need huge parking lots because everybody's driving.

Construct a city so that 95% of the people take public transportation, and you can keep parking space for the rest 5% who really need it, and they will be practically at the front door when they get off.

Re:We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016) by trothamel on Thursday June 28, 2018 @03:05PM (#17419588)
Short of things like taxis and ubers and so on, is there any form of public transportation that is so dense, when it comes to stopping locations?
Re:We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016) by yongjik on Thursday June 28, 2018 @03:21PM (#17419716)
Sorry I wasn't clear: I meant "at the front door" for those 5% who have to drive. The rest can walk. It's good for health, and usually still faster than being stuck in the sea of single occupancy vehicles! :)
Re:We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016) by rootusrootus on Thursday June 28, 2018 @03:45PM (#17419889)
I feel like this only makes sense if you build cities of any size, even when they have 50 people, as if they are ultra-dense. The reality is that public transit takes a certain size city before it reaches critical mass and becomes superior to individual transit. Even where I live (Portland, Oregon) which is considered to have decent public transit, I would have to walk a lot and plan on 2-3 times as long if I wanted to stick with public transit. The density just isn't there yet.
Re:We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016) by bluGill on Thursday June 28, 2018 @04:43PM (#17420329)
It isn't lack of density, that is a symptom. We don't allows stores, jobs and houses to be within walking distance of each other. As a result you have to drive everywhere. As a result you have to have a car. As a result we need space for lots of cars, as a result things are spread out.

If you had stores and jobs within walking distance of your house you would not need a car. As a result you wouldn't find a car worth having. As a result you wouldn't need all the space dedicated to the car. Also as a result you would take public transportation.

It also hurts that our focus on not allowing change means that even when someone is willing to spend their own money to tear down a smaller house/apartment to replace it with something larger we won't allow it. Thus areas that "want" to grow denser cannot do that. The only option is to grow outwards. That means people need to be farther out, which implies more time in a car, which implies more roads and parking spaces, which in turn means less density is possible.

Note that the above is simplistic. I ignored many other factors. It is a complex problem and no one change can solve it.