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Show me a car free neighborhood and I’ll show you insane real estate prices due to demand.
Then people will point to those prices as proof it’s a “failure” then spend 2-3x what they “save” on housing on auto loans/expenses.
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.
St Augustine?
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.
Sorry wasn’t trying to have you dox yourself, I actually do know Orlando pretty well so I think I know where you mean
lol, no prob.
Removing cars from urban areas means lower carbon emissions, less air pollution, and fewer road traffic accidents
Not to mention how much quieter it is.
Why would anyone hate that? To me it sounds like a utopia. I just had to buy new tires for my car @#$%*!
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.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.“
Yeah, what about my property values?? Will someone think of my property valuessss 😭😭😭
“People don’t want to give up their freedom”
- The older generation
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.
It can start by advocating for new pedestrian areas in your city or town, maybe it’s only a block, but it’s a start
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 feel like this is people about most things. Most people aren’t very imaginative.
They’re kind of stupidly in favor of how things are, but once it changes they’re like this is great I don’t know why we didn’t do it before.
Like imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist and someone tried to create them. Conservatives would shit their pants hating it.
IMO part of the fix for that is liberating psychedelics. There has been some research finding that if someone takes psilocybin (shrooms) before they reach the age of 35, they are significantly more open minded for the rest of their life. Though I’m not sure how they controlled for the question as to whether the drug makes people more psychologically flexible or whether they are more psychologically flexible in the first place if they are willing to try it.
Either way, it seems to naturally follow that conservatives proportionally tend to avoid psychedelics. It’s anecdotal but my fellow psychonauts are all liberal.
Not just conservatives.
Yah, Plenty of liberals shit them selves when you suggest giving an unalloyed good away for free.
Conservatives wouldn’t create libraries at all.
Liberals will create libraries by contracting it to private companies who mismanage and embezzle.
Might be a fun social experiment to propose a public gun lending armory. Like a library, you can walk in and check-out an AK-47 for a day or week for free. But just like the library charges for printed pages, you would have to pay for the ammo.
I think there should be libraries for all sorts of things. For example, everyone on my street has their own lawnmower, trimmer, etc. And very rarely do people mow their lawns at the exact same time. It would be a lot more efficient if there was a place to check out the lawnmower to mow your lawn and put it away for someone else to use.
They are on the rise.
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.
It’s weird to watch Americans celebrate MLK Day and know that most of their ancestors were very much against him and the civil rights movement
The secret to making things better in the world is that you can’t rely on people making good choices, you have to remove the bad choices.
“What seems to work best is a carrot-and-stick approach—creating positive reasons to take a bus or to cycle rather than just making driving harder.”
I guess this is why we shouldn’t only play the “fuck cars” tune but also include melodies like “we love to bike” and “public transport is fun” 😉
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.
That’s why the method is called carrot and stick!
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.
public transport is fun
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. ☹️
Okay, now factor in car insurance and maintenance costs. I don’t buy your statement “taking the car is 2-3 times cheaper”.
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.
Can you specify where “here” is?
Public transport IS fun! Much easier to masturbate on the train than while driving a car
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.
I wanna live in one 😭
Taking suggestions on cities lol!
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?
When we have a pedestrian zone here, there are bollards at each end. It tends to discourage most cars.
I love living in a car free city. I can’t believe America doesn’t build more cities like mine.
What city?
san francisco
Huh, weird that when I was there, there were literally thousands of cars. Probably just hallucinated it
That’s not really what car free means.
For years I’ve somehow missed this. Cars driving on nearly every street and somehow that “car-free”, yeah makes perfect sense.
I think it’s because the bar is so low, just the ability to choose to walk for everyday commuting, errands, and leisure qualifies as car free. Ie, you can choose to be car free if you want.
Oh. So you mean the places where you have to be rich to live at a nice place, while everyone else has to live in a tiny apartment in a huge building that’s been borderline uninhabitable since the 1970’s?
Yeah I don’t understand that at all. I thought car free meant a place, usually a part of town, where cars are not allowed. Those places exist. So to call places nothing like that “car free” seems pretty useless imo
The only city that I know of that fits that definition is Venice, Italy. I’ve been able to live car free in SF for 10 years.
So do you still utilize Uber or driving services? If so you’re still dependent.
I’ve used taxis a handful of times over the past 10 years. Mostly for surgery related things.
I can’t tell if this is sarcasm or not.
I imagine bikes will be very useful in making US cities walkable. The streets have been built very wide to make space for cars, which would make walking more tedious, but bikes are the perfect solution to this bc they let you cover more (flat) distance with just the power of your legs.
People absolutely be going the e bike route.
The only thing keeping me from regularly using bikes or ebikes for short distance travel are the cars and trucks sharing the same space that ignore bike lanes and try to get as close as they can to you when they pass you, and if I try to use the largely unused sidewalks and dip into the street to avoid the occasional pedestrians I get a ticket.
ignore bike lanes and try to get as close as they can to you when they pass you
That’s why protected bike lanes are the ideal, preferably grade separated from the road. Remove the problem via infrastructure, and more people will bike.
A return to trolleys would also be lovely. A lot of American cities are already laid out with trolleycars in mind.
Oh, I didn’t know this
Yeah, cities in America from around 1870 to 1920 had extensive trolleycar networks. They were so widespread you could hop between them and even travel across state lines. Every major city had them and they were the primary mode of urban transportation. Now cities only have trolleycars as a novelty, like San Francisco still has theirs. New Orleans has beautiful streetcar lines. They’re mostly used for tourists, but if they were made more extensive and modernized then New Orleans could have very functional mass transit.
Most of the trolley networks were ripped up to make room for extra lanes or parking lots. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be possible to repurpose existing roads for trams/trolleys. I really believe this.
So do I. Yeah a ton of cities used to have them too over here in the UK but very few are still around.
Every two lane road has enough space for four lanes of bicycles (one passing lane for ebikes and one lane for normal bikes going in each direction)
I love this. It’s a simple way to train an open-minded carbrain that there are easy ways to convert existing infrastructure on the cheap!
Due to the pandemic, people needed more outdoor space in cities (since its unsafe to eg eat indoors), so NYC closed roads to cars and turned them into basically public parks.
When the shops started opening again, they city got a lot of pressure and they made a campaign to close I think 25% of the city’s roads to cars in some years
Unfortunately, still not car free
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.
I’m living a car-free lifestyle, despite holding a license to drive. It’s more freedom than I’ve ever had.
Been there at times. It’s great not having to pay and worry about a car (done that at times as well). Yet, if you need to move house or get somewhere difficult, you can lease or borrow a car or van. And you can be an extra driver on trips.
