Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Looks like you've never been in a town in the Netherlands. I've been, many times, and it's not all roses. Yes, they are often better for bikers, but overall, they are traffic nightmares.
The low-density housing situation is an American problem that we don't have. We, on the other side, have cities grown for thousands of years, and nobody thought of leaving space for people, bikes, and public transport. So we usually try to protect the weakest (the pedestrians) by giving them a safe space (unless violated by bikers), and the streets have to be shared, simply because there is no space. Yes, you can wish for all cars to vanish there, but it is not realistic. Just like wishing your suburbans away.
I spent a couple of decades living in Spain. I'm well familiar with old towns.
Designing our streets for pedestrians first, transit/bikes next and private motor vehicles last is the way it should be. If that means that some streets are inconvenient for car traffic, so be it. Surely that is preferable to downgrading the ability of the most vulnerable to move around, or the quality of that experience.
North-american style car-dependent suburbs are an aberration that should disappear altogether. They didn't exist a hundred years ago and they shouldn't exist now. It is immoral that the people living sustainably in urban centers are subsidizing the people living at large in the suburbs. If they like them so much they can pay their true cost to society.
Nobody designed them the way they are, at least not with a grand design in mind. Traffic is shaped by planning for existing demand. To change planning, you need to change the demand first. Working against demand won't get you anywhere, at least not in politics, and they are holding the purse strings.
While it is not wrong, as long as you don't have a credible idea why millions of people should give up their homes to live in overpriced shoe boxes without a bit of green and quiet in the city, this will get you nowhere. People love living in spaceous houses they own. People love having some green around them. People love the quiet. And first of all, people love not having to deal with all the other city problems.
Remember that those urban centers would and could simply not exist without people from the outskirts working and shopping in those urban centers. The dependency is definitely not one-sided.
That is not how it works, at all. They model future demand and they do make executive decisions to shape traffic in the way they want it to be, not just the way it is today.
That is happening because:
They don't love it so much when they have to pay for the cost of the infrastructure needed to support them. Stop subsidizing suburbs and suddenly people will be much more accepting of more modest accommodations, like most of us do.
Plainly false, as those suburbanites could simply move closer to where they work, if only zoning laws permitted them to do so, which is not the case in most of North America.
Again, and it is a point that no amount of mental yoga can get around: what we want is something that already happens in plenty of towns around Europe and Japan that existed before the advent of the car. It is not unrealistic, it is the historical norm.