Instead of just electrifying vehicles, cities should be investing in alternative methods of transportation. This article is by the Scientific Foresight Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), a EU’s own think tank.
Instead of just electrifying vehicles, cities should be investing in alternative methods of transportation. This article is by the Scientific Foresight Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), a EU’s own think tank.
Only thing is that electrifying vehicles is a little easier than rebuilding a city (or part of it). And it don’t need to be a really old part, even a 60/70 years old city zone is relatively hard to convert. Not to speak of even older zones.
But yes, newly build zone of city should be designed with this in mind.
In my (over 1,000 year old) city, blocking several streets with bollards and massively reducing street parking worked just fine so far. As did curbing traffic coming in, with longer “red” phases at traffic lights for cars entering, when sensors detect too many cars in the city.
The “smart” traffic lights idea is very interesting, never heard of it. Which country is that?
Germany (city of Potsdam)
smart lights come in other forms:
I don’t recall which country implemented what, but IIRC Canada, Sweden and Spain each had one of the above two systems.
That’s the most dystopian and borderline insane thing I’ve read for some time.
There is a quite good opt-out procedure: cycle.
But how do I participate in the lottery as cyclist, pedestrian or as a resident?
I don’t think whatever article I read about it covered that.
In principle, you should theoretically be able to register for tracking and then have a QR code attached to the front of your bike / shirt which would enter you into the lottery.
We also have restricted access to the center of the city (the infamous Area C and Area B) even stricter but so far they are not working that well simply because they created them but not added the necessary alternatives (public transportation first and foremost).
Where I lived when I was younger, to be able to have a neighborhood that is not that dependent on cars (back at the time it was not, everything you need was at a 5 minute walk) they basically levelled the neighborhood and rebuild it, and it was relatively new (post WWII), a thing that is not an option in older area (center).
The way of your city (or of Milano) are also appliable only to big cities where everything you need is present, where I currently live I need a car for a number of reasons, because my small town has not all what I can need, for example the only way to go to the train station I use is by car since it is too distant to walk to (or I can choose the other one and hope to use less than 1.5 hours for a 20 minute train travel), and there is not a public transportation system.
Maybe I am naive but I think that people would discard the car (or use it a lot less) if for the day by day they have an alternative, so when I said it would be easier I should have added the missing implicit (for me) part “in the short term”.
You want I don’t own/use a car in 5 years from now ? Fine, where are the construction sites for the railroads and the other public transportation system I will need to use ? Because I can stop using the car in a month, but you cannot build a railroad in a month.
Just take lanes away from cars
It’s a good move but note that car drivers are extremely clingy to their convenience. They protest violently and burn tires under the threat of pedestrianizing a road. The hostility they bring to the slightest possibility of a perceived drop in their convenience is unmatched. The car lobby is BIG and the politicians themselves are in that car-driving demographic.
I understand the sentiment, but that could cause more issues than it solves. Cars then would be forced to compete for space with bicycle again,only this time on all bicycle roads. Or houses could not have car access at all, if you’d narrow the streets.
Why? The other person said: “Take lanes away from cars”. There wouldn’t be any cars on that lane.
Huh, somehow misread that as “take all lanes away”
There are some model projects of super blocks which are already very promising. They change the nature of car use inside a neighborhood by making pass-through traffic impossible and limiting parking space to only residents as well as making roads very narrow all the while being mixed use. It makes driving faster than 10km/h pretty hard, all the while still keeping it possible for people who really need it.
It’s called a “woonerf”, we’ve had them since the seventies.
Yaeh ok, but what are the issues you were announcing before talking about the benefits?
Is it easier or is it just shifting the cost? We’re talking thousands of cars needing electrification in any given city, at let’s say they get it to an average of $35k each.
Picking a random city, let’s say Cincinnati. They already have some infrastructure but it’s largely car dependent. They have 148k households, of which 44.1% have one car, 25.2% have two, 6.8% have three, and 2.4% have four. So roughly 65k + 75k + 30k + 14k = 184k cars * 35k each or minimum 6.4 billion to electrify them all.
I don’t know how much good public transit costs, but I have to imagine $6.4b can buy a fair amount of it.
You anyway need a new car every 15 years. So no additional costs.
Actually it really isn’t easier to keep things car-oriented because building a city so there is enough room for cars is fundamentally impossible.
I beg to differ!
The point is not to build (or reshape) a city to have enough room for cars, but to build (or reshape) a city so that you don’t need to have (or to use so often) a car for the day by day.
But yes, you can. Our cities are basically build this way, the only problem is that they are build with much lower number of cars in mind.
I mean sure, you can absolutely build a city to have enough room for cars for 10 rich assholes and everyone else can deal with the fact that the city is built to cater to those rich assholes instead of the majority of its inhabitants but I think it was pretty much implied by my statement that a car-oriented city would be the kind that has enough room for all its inhabitants and visitors to use cars and that is fundamentally impossible since cities have a lot of people and cars need huge amounts of space per user.