576
City roads should be ‘ripped out completely’ to fight pollution, says government adviser
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
576 points (93.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9664 readers
487 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You know there are dozens of major cities that have converted major roads, and entire precincts, to foot traffic only... right?
Turns out it's pretty easy to transport inventory in hand trolleys a few blocks as most major cities, especially business districts, are flat as fuck.
"converted major roads" is very different from "ripped out completely"
I actually live next to a few places that have done this... with one or two streets for about 3 blocks in a downtown area... and they all have streets on the backsides to handle cargo delivery and trash pickup... so again, not "ripped out completely".
The great thing about FOOT traffic, is you don't need roads. You only need paths (e.g. the sidewalk) to bike or trolley inventory around.
How about YOU provide evidence of ANYWHERE converting blocks of a suburb or city to parkland, and suddenly facing the supply chain crisis you hypothesise? If you can't, then your argument is imaginary and based on nothing but your own biases... and maybe you should support change until there's reasonable evidence that it doesn't work... and no, a sample size of one is not evidence.
There isn't any township of any appreciable size (>50k pop) that has completely ripped out road infrastructure that I know of. I can't prove a negative.
Do you have an example of a location that has done so?
Point me to where someone is suggesting this? Sounds like a strawman
That's what the article is talking about.
Where does it say all roads? I think it's pretty clear in context that they're not suggesting that
And? I mean, sure it could technically be interpreted that way, but with only three words of the original quote, "all roads" is a pretty unkind reading IMO. More likely the article has deliberately introduced ambiguity to stoke exactly the outrage you exhibit.
How else would you interpret it (within the constrained context of this particular article, and not including anything from your pre-existing personal opinions)?
Then why is this article here, and received positively by this community?
projection, or else hyperbolae
Ripped out completely as in actually remove them as opposed to closing them to vehicle traffic but still leaving the roads. Especially with that second quote.
Yes, that's how I read it also. That is an impractical idea because even if you can build a city that supports 95% of personal transit needs with public infrastructure, you will still need independently powered vehicles for logistics roles - so you will still need roads to drive them on. That is my whole point.
Not all the roads go away, but some subset are ripped out completely.
You've bought into a strawman if you believe the intention is to remove all road infrastructure from an entire city. No city on earth would ever do that.
Imagine if every second parallel street were a grass strip, instead of a road. Fire trucks, ambulances, vans, etc could still drive down them as needed, and nowhere would be more than a couple of blocks from a road, but regular traffic capacity would be cut by 50%, and so would pollution.
So did every person who upvoted this article, apparently. And the person who uploaded it.
This idea is a lot more sensible. It is NOT what is proposed in the article.
What the article proposes is the idea that I am arguing against, not your idea.