Re:Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased
by dtwest on Friday May 15, 2020 @01:57PM
(#23195191)
NYC public transit usage is more similar to Paris or London than it is to any of the cities you listed. 56.5% of New Yorkers commute with public transit (2015), seems pretty on par with European standards to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/10/riding-bikes-...
Re:Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased
by flipflipper on Friday May 15, 2020 @10:39AM
(#23192683)
NYC did legalize e-bikes at the start of all this, a step in the right direction.
* Used congestion pricing as a tool to reduce pollution/returning traffic/mode-shift to cars
* Shut off large areas of their city to cars
* Rapidly built pedestrian/bike networks to accommodate for non-car movement
While NYC has:
* Indefinitely postponed congestion pricing
* Defunded bike safety and public transit improvement initiatives
* Not built any cohesive bike or pedestrian systems to encourage non-car transport
Of course in pre-COVID times, NYC severely lagged in both pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure/investment, and famously has some of the most expensive public-transit construction costs in the world.
re: car-centric cities, agreed that somewhere like Nashville is not going to have these kinds of problems. However, a large swath of Americans live in public transit or carpool-reliant cities (NYC/SF/Seattle/DC/Chicago/Southern California, many large southern cities). Mode-shift to private transit would increase traffic 10-20+% in most of these places, which I think we can all agree is not ideal for pollution, gridlock, parking needs, public health, etc.