We don't just want "car-free cities" for the sake of it... We want walkable cities with infrastructure and proximity to needs/wants built with pedestrians in mind
I lived across the street from a department store, a grocery, some pizza places, a "smoke" shop, video game stores, and everything else I could want on a normal day. It was amazing. I walked everywhere except to work. I miss living there. The main downside was that it was in Florida.
Nah, it was Orlando, but not the city proper, more like one of the smaller areas around the actual city. Trying not to give too much away, but it was near Altamonte Springs.
Don't know about other Americans, but I would love to be able to have this kind of lifestyle. It's just not realistic over here due to the infrastructure. It's not within my power to make the changes necessary for it though.
Boomers. I was blown away when I went to a city hall meeting about expanding the roads and hearing their hot takes.
After the wave of old boomers (most of the audience) complained about how dangerous the whole world has become that they can't even take their trash out on the street, they say a walkable city just opens up "more danger".
To them, walkable streets means seeing more diversity, which is apparently super scary.
It makes perfect sense when you understand modern city design as a form of mostly unconscious but purposeful violence, that pretty much defines the middle class Boomer generation in wealthy rich countries. Structural violence… as far as the eye can see!
US Boomers love that shit, the prison system, healthcare, highway design, the tax filing system the list just goes on and on.
I really wish my parents generation could have just been skipped and instead I had parents from the previous generation who actually fought for something and understood how to defend workers rights.
I don't live in a car-free city, but I wish I would. Fuck cars and especially fuck the people in them. I live in a pedestrian zone, but connected to the main artery through the city. You would think that labeling something as a pedestrian zone would reduce the amount of cars going through, but no, it's just a second main street. Might as well take down the ped zone sign, it gets ignored anyway, so why waste money making one?
I've already warmed up to the idea that we'd have to force positives changes through in the dead of night. With all things said and done, watch those who'd rail against it say they've always been in favor of it.
It's like when chuds try to take credit for civil rights, or 5 day work weeks (Henry Ford willed the concept into existence, not years of direct action by the labor movement).
Lenin talked about how the ruling class will actively oppose a revolutionary figure, but once society at large accepts them, the ruling class will switch face and pretend like it always supported said figure.
My 2 cents: Living in a climate that gets all the seasons, a car makes things much easier in the winter for numerous reasons. Also, as someone that lives with chronic pain issues, walking or biking places on a daily is quite difficult for me, again, having a car resolves this.
I think the term "car free" is a misnomer, more like "car as a non primary form of transport for most people most of the time" is more accurate but doesn't roll off the tongue as well.
There are a lot of people with mobility issues in such cities that are serviced in different ways, a lot of times with specially licensed cars etc.
I like the term multi-modal. Everybody should have access to all kind of modes of transportation. And you can pick the best fit depending on your task.
Going to the dentist? Bike.
Getting bread at the bakery? Walk.
Commuting? Train.
Heavy stuff to get to your parents' house? Carsharing.
And so on.
Yeah, I hate the term "car-free". That said, even for someone who primarily uses a car, advocating for bike lanes and public transit makes sense, as the fewer people there are taking up road space and parking, the easier it is for you to drive / park.
Ah yes, winter! I live in a wintery place (Quebec) and cars in winter need very much care to work properly. They need plowed and salted streets or they get stuck or can't go uphill. If that level of care was the same for pedestrians and cyclists, it would be much easier to move around without a car.
Also, you may need a car because of chronic pain but surely not everyone driving a car needs one for chronic pain? And wouldn't it be nicer for people that really need a car if there were fewer cars around?
I'm in my early 40ies and lived all those winters without a car and I still think it's silly to say they are "adapted" or "working well" in winter. Every winter there are multi car collisions/pile-ups on highways. They slip and slide easily. Multiple times in a year cars can't climb the little hill in front of my place. It takes even more space to park them as there are snowbanks everywhere. Sometimes they get covered in ice.
I understand you may not have lived carefree but here's two places with extreme weather that do fine without cars (provided people invest the minimum amount to establish public transport):
@sturmblast
Ok
(add (un)appropriate prefix as needed)
As a so-called 'ban cars' advocate;
I -wholly- get that private automobiles are a huge boon to folks who are severely otherwise challenged to get from where they are to where they want(need) to go.
by no means have I any -want nor desire- to throw obstructions in their way.
Rather, get rid of the obstructions presented by abled folks who just don't want to walk a few blocks, take up all the spaces, and such just because entitled. @ylai
A bicycle is not good enough to transport cargo or large items and this is very important when the city is large. In a very large city, riding a bicycle is problematic. It is very easy to accidentally puncture a bicycle wheel tube and the bicycle will become a burden. A bicycle can be stolen from you more easily than a car. The bicycle does not protect you from rain and snow and is more difficult to ride on ice, mud and puddles.
The car is more convenient, more comfortable and more prestigious. Almost all beautiful girls, if they have a choice between you and a guy who has a nice car, will choose the guy with the car under any pretext. They want to live comfortably and prestigiously and richly, so they will reject you and your bicycle and go to visit a guy with a good car.
Perhaps women will begin to be strongly attracted to horses, and not to men without a horse, but with a bicycle. Because horses have become the privilege of the rich ;-)
If you urgently need to quickly take someone close to you somewhere far away, is that also a problem with skills? Especially if you need to take two people at once to the hospital or, for example, to a nightclub or to the forest outside the city for fishing and barbecue or somewhere else.
What if the wheels fell off every single car in the world at the same time? I can come up with ridiculous hypotheticals too.
What about all the ambulances that no longer have to pick up to traffic collision victims? What about the ambulances being able to transport people faster due to the roads being clear of traffic? It's not just a ridiculous hypothetical, it's one that's much more likely to happen with cars around.
Nobody's proposing banning ambulances. You should be able to take the metro to the club. You should also be able to take it outside of the city and you can figure out the remainder of your journey from there. Reclaiming land from cars would also allow more space within cities for parks and such and decrease the need to get out of the city to escape dickheads leaning on their horns.
How would ambulances work in a car free city? They seem kind of bulky for a city built for bikes. Unless we're assuming those cities will still have huge roads to drive on?
Probably need two in case multiple emergency vehicles need to be on the scene. Imagine a bombing - you need ambulances, fire trucks, police, etc. That's easy with huge car-based infrastructure but a bike-city seems complicated.
Unless you just build huge roads everywhere despite the lack of cars, which would be sad.
what the other guy said and, to be honest, i really don't see us just destroying all of the infrastructure our predecessors built. itd be a waste not to convert, say, a city street to a light rail track or something or other.
If you need to go to the hospital, you can call an ambulance that will be able to quickly and easily reach you due to there not being any car traffic. (The utterly ludicrous cost of US healthcare is its own separate problem)
Going to the countryside? Take a bus to the outskirts, or even out into the country itself, and cycle to a particular spot. Going to or from a club? Take the metro, take the bus, maybe even (depending no the strictness of 'no cars') a taxi, which you can afford on special occasions with the literally tens of thousands of dollars you'll have saved by not needing to buy, insure, repair and fuel a car.
You have to also understand that for a car-free society to even be on the table, a number of other social changes will have to have been made too. So just arguing that going without cars is impossible due to the limitations of the car-centric society that currently exists is just circular reasoning. There SHOULD be ways to do the things you've listed without using a car, and the reason there aren't is BECAUSE of cars.
What if an ambulance gets stuck in traffic? What if a road's blocked by an accident? Or because it's being repaired or relaid because of all the car traffic over it?
What if all the ambulances are occupied tending to one of the ~2,500,000 people injured in car accidents each year?
Nah, I saw some kids stealing a bike in town the other week, and they did it in a few seconds maybe 3 or 4 metres from a security guard. Smart kids, they acted in the moment I walked between them and the guard with pit crew-like efficiency - two steadying the bars, one cutting and removing the lock, and the last getting on the bike - so by the time the security guard called out they were already riding and running away. You can steal a car fast, but not that fast, and not in the middle of a crowded city centre.
The cops definitely don't give the slightest shit, but it's not the only reason.
You can buy really good bike tires for like $60 that are very unlikely to puncture. and cargo bikes exist. plus, you can still have small trucks that are designed to transport things instead of these lifted monstrosities that are only going to lead their office worker driver to throw out their back trying to clean a couch onto them.
Wait until you hear that some not only hate the ideas, but think they’re a conspiracy theory by some higher power to make people….. be able to walk to the shops? I don’t know…
No no, the conspiracy is that by living in walkable cities, you're easier to track, because nobody in city has phones and there's no cameras anywhere in cities, and of course everybody in cities pays for things in cash...
Incidentally, the people I know who've fallen for this canard also live in the countryside, make it a point to never go to the city, and also have phones and debit/credit cards and spend time online....
Abigail Thorns video on the subject briefly yet beautifully dunked on the idea that taking away cars is taking away "freedom", since you need a government issued photo ID to operate them, registration and strict rules to use them on the roads, and new cars are full of computers monitoring you and sendingndata to insurance companies. To quote directly, "you know what doesn't do any of that? Fucking feet!"
Every time a new apartment or condo development gets built here, there are people in the local community forums who rabble about "15 minute cities" and how they are trying to force us get rid of cars and control our travel. In spite of the fact these buildings are built with parking lots and garages that are as big as, if not bigger than the buildings themselves.
The article talks about it happening throughout Europe, and politicians getting death threats for it.
It's not limited to Americans. But hey, it's mindless shitting on Americans, so let's upvoted it even though the article makes it clear the point makes no sense! We're so much better than those Americans who don't even bother to educate themselves.
Always worth remembering that American-style suburbs were a deliberate political project in the postwar period. They didn't "just happen", the government spend billions making them happen at the behest of auto makers, property developers, and racists (but I repeat myself).
Unfortunately here public transport is seen as something best left to 'the market', instead of treating it as a public commodity which gets its economic value from enabling people to contribute to economy by enabling them to get to work, go shopping etc. So now ticket prices are ridiculous, to the point where taking the car is 2-3 times cheaper. And of course you'll need to get to said transport first. Need a bus? If you do not live in a city or larger town you're just shit out of luck after 18:00 or so. Need to be somewhere, somewhat early in the morning? Wel tough luck for you, make sure to have somebody with a car standby to drop you off at the nearest train station. I want to like public transport and consider it fun, but my experience every time I try it is pain, suffering and awkward schedules instead. ☹️
Depends on how badly gouged your "local" prices are...
Where I live some train lines have gotten way better in recent times, others still cost an arm and a leg with unreliable trains and if you allow amortized car costs the car might still be competitive... (although I absolutely grant you that utility factoring in the amount of stuff you can do on a train ride both long and short is way way higher than while driving)
It's definitely not generally cheaper in Germany if you only need to move regional. But I'm interested in a comparison with any other country. I guess an urban area would be a requirement for a fair comparison.
If you care to look further into this, look for cost per kilometer estimates, factoring all the costs of owning your own vehicle vs. the cost per kilometer of taking public transit.
Unfortunately it's easier (say: cheaper) to make driving so expensive and hard that it makes public transport look like the carrot, than actually making public transport more attractive so it actually becomes the carrot.
But then they call you insane because transit very obviously shitty. Like i shill for the alternatives but its barely functional most of the time, much less pleasant
Feel free to spit on the current state of transit; it's shit in so many places and there's no pretending otherwise. It's important to stress that the transit will be unrecognizable from current state if properly funded. If people think I'm talking about them ditching their cars, getting on the existing transit and watching their trip times go up 292%, they'd be right to dismiss me.
If you're interested in theory on this subject I'd recommend looking into "theory of practice". It's all about this and, like with every single other good urban planning thing, it's not at all new. We just pretend like it is so that politicians might finally do something other than build a fucking road.
I don’t think a car-free city actually exists. The article mentions Copenhagen:
“[London] has avoided the kind of outright car bans seen elsewhere in Europe, such as in Copenhagen”
I’ve been to Copenhagen. There are cars throughout the city. There are some cycle-only paths that connect to intersections with cars. I cycled along side cars all over the city. Apparently Wired is calling car-reduced cities and cities with small car-free regions a “car-free city”.
Exceptionally, Brussels is a car-free city but for only one day out of the year. And car-free day falls on a Sunday. On that day it becomes illegal to drive a car in the city center without a special pass after showing you have good reason to use a car on that day. But even on that day, the outer region of Brussels is unaffected.
I live in Copenhagen and only own a bike. The amount of cars and their size has risen drastically the last 10 years, it sucks. Almost nowhere in the city is actually car-free, but there are bike paths almost everywhere which is nice.
I dream of the day I can bike safely to my places. Right now I basically have the supermarket and two bars in distance, and then it's a mess of double lane roads and highway ramps before I get to any bike friendly paths to go further afield. It really sucks.
Send an email to your local council. Attach photos, explain what could solve your horrible situation. Nothing will probably happen, but if many people start asking those things officially, in the long run it may help.
