I saw a stat going around a couple years ago that back at the streetcar peak, you could travel from like NYC to Madison,WI entirely by street car (I’m paraphrasing; can’t remember the exact cities.) Does anyone know the stat I’m talking about? Would love to find the source
Developments like this can spur the need for more transit options around cities, such as Trams/LRTs and trains. It can also keep business in the city and inside your neighborhood and make a city more walkable and enjoyable. Ultimately less car dependent.
The hard part for cities is to implement this well. Currently almost all new buildings in north america prioritize 1 and 2 bedroom units. Trying to find a well priced 3 or 4 bedroom in a “lively” downtown center, close to transit and work, with plenty of schooling in the area is almost impossible.
Here’s another good article talking about why developers don’t provide adequate family units.
If this same building technique was implemented in north america, together with rethinking zoning requirements it could push developers to create these “missing middle” communities.
Kinda new to this sub but if you want the “fuck cars” perspective on this; when cars were first introduced to the US there was actually a moment of national consideration on the safety of speeding motor vehicles suddenly infesting our towns and cities and the associated injuries (some 94% initial increase in child fatalities, for example). Many people preferred improvements in public transport at the time and in fact there was a proposal in Cincinnati to require by law that cars be fitted with a device that would limit their speed to just 25 mph (this proposal would soon be stamped out by a well-funded “vote no” campaign). If cars themselves were to blame, then regulators would go after cars and those responsible for their creation, i.e. the auto industry.
The auto industry responded to pushback like this by banding together to manufacture consent for their products, thus creating a massive propaganda campaign that blamed individual reckless drivers and pedestrians (inventing the term, “jaywalking”. Streets used to be for people AND vehicles, so this was a massive culture shift. “Jay” being akin to the term “hick” at the time.) for the uptick in road deaths that, of course, wouldn’t exist if not for the phenomena of cars itself. This allowed them to then use road fatalities to argue in favor of increased accommodations for vehicles in cities.
Source: Slow Cities, Introduction: changing cultures of speed, Tranter & Tolley (highly recommend, it’s available to read for free here as part of the PMC COVID-19 Collection for some reason lol: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7325856/ )
Anyways, all in all, I’m not really sure how this fits here. Although a bit philosophical (read: Virilio, the original accident, “to invent the [car] is to invent the [car] accident”), the car itself is in fact partially to blame. There’s not many other ways for the common person to accidentally destroy buildings like that. If there was no car, or at least that person was not compelled to own it, that wall would still be intact.
quietly leaves this introduction to slow cities here weeks after this meme was posted, hoping like-minded people will find it and read it:www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7325856/
No, it’s to own a car for personal use. Singapore is a city state, emphasis on the city part. The article also says it only takes 60 minutes to drive end to end so the need for a car is probably minimal. The fee they are referring to here was created to reduce the amount of cars on the roads to help with traffic. Singapore has a pretty robust public transit system so for most people it probably isn’t a deal breaker. I’m glad to see a country taking action to limit car dependance.
Thumbtacks won’t pierce the walls. Two inch nails with rubber bands wrapped around the bottom creating a base might do something like that, but that’d be wrong and illegal and a silly idea that’ll get you some unwanted attention
I’m trying to picture this contraption you describe (for educational, completely non-practical reasons of course), where does the cotton and rubber bands go?
I can’t find a fixed value for the number of spaces in the Burrough, however this CBC article suggests that 29.8% of the Burrough is parking (bike lanes are 2%).
The burrough is 16.5km^2. Therefore 4.917 km^2 is parking. Parkingindustry.ca offers 8" x 16" as the average parking space in Canada, which is 0.000011891589 km^2. I’m going to round up to 0.00002 km^2 to make math easier and absorb non-stall area of parking lots.
That gives us at least 245,850 parking spots in the Burrough. So the percentage of parking lost is 0.1%.
Villeray–Saint-Michel–Parc-Extension resident parking permits cost $100 for most cars.
Is that 29.8% the percent of total land or the percent of total street space? The article’s wording is kind of vague.
As an aside, I also find it very frustrating how one woman quoted in the article said this:
“When you’re doing a project like the bike lane, have a compromise in mind,” Bailakis said in an interview outside. “Why do the old people, kids, families get booted out [of the conversation] just to please one people: the bike people?”
It’s such a gross way to portray the topic. They just automatically assume the car as default and treat bikes like some thing that only the “bike people” use. I might ask her why she believes my sister, who had her driver’s license suspended because of a medical condition, doesn’t deserve the same rights as those physically fit to drive. My sister can ride a bike just fine, but just can’t drive, and yet car-dependent urban design strips her of what ought to be equal rights to mobility.
Clearly children and the elderly are literally physically incapable of using any mode of transit besides a car, thus our car-dependent hellscape is actually an act of charity out of the pure goodness of our hearts!!
Is that 29.8% the percent of total land or the percent of total street space? The article’s wording is kind of vague.
Dunno, I assumed total area, and balanced that by giving nearly half the area to “parking area” that didn’t count towards the number of stalls.
I haven’t been up there, so I don’t know that the burrough is like. I’d also be unlikely to see anything not within 1km of a metro station even if I did go, so my view would be biased anyways.
Alternatively, the population of the burrough is 143,85, so they are removing one stall for every 575 residents (all residents, not just driving residents).
I would just laugh at their lack of knowledge. My tires are filled with a tubeless compound that fills holes. Anything short of a sidewall blowout barely slows me down.
I’ve heard of hunters placing wires strung across MTB trails at neck height. In Spain several people have died or become tetraplegic due to them. You can’t see the wire in time to do anything about it.
It's not clear to me where the people who are all for bike lanes but also want the parking spaces to stay think the space for bike lanes is going to come from. We aren't Time Lords, we can't just fold a few extra feet of space into there. So what is it that they actually want?
No bike lanes. But they know they can’t say that, so they hem and haw about “careful cautious progress” that looks very suspiciously like no progress at all. They talk about compromise, but their idea of compromise is they get everything they want, and everyone else just has to work around that.
This video is about racism, but the same general points apply to urbanism and car dependency.
This timestamp til about 20mins (17:45 to 20:00) names a bunch of specific examples (of racism), and explains the thought process behind dismissing them as examples, which again, very much applies to urbanism and car dependency.
(Also the entire video series is good, but not quite relevant here)
Basically, they don’t want anything to actually change. They have no problem admitting that symptoms are problems, but fixing the core issue would require admitting that they’re part of that core issue, and they’d have to change. And they don’t want to.
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