Like most things, it is about preference and/or what the measure of success is. Some people prefer the tighter, mixed-use concepts and some don’t. I know people that would love a concept like this and I know people that would be overwhelmed and depressed.
I just wanna add that walkable, while always advocated as a dense “15 minutes city” I hope doesn’t always have to be. There are examples of less dense walkable places, too. A little village with a market to one side, perhaps? “Walkable” exactly refers to a design pattern focused on pedestrian safety and pedestrian-scaled development. Aaaand that could exclude density, at the cost of population size.
Check out some random Dutch suburbs. For example, a neighbourhood in what is generally regarded as a shit city: maps.app.goo.gl/UYSB2iLeEbvPea4G6
No high rise construction, single family homes, 15 min walk from the supermarket (or 3 by bike), even less to a school (9 min walk if you make an effort to pick a bad spot), and hardly anyone lives by a big road and most places can be reached without ever crossing one.
And this is a city that is generally regarded as crappy, soulless and awful to the point that it’s a meme. (Lelystad is the Almere of Flevoland ;) )
Omg I thought it was just gonna look like my town but with bike lanes. No, your worst city is really creative actually. This is so quiet and safe, contrary to anything I’ve ever seen in America.
They’re coming down in price, many places offer subsidies to get one, and there are puncture-resistant tires that do wonders. That said, I also live too far from work to bike, because I can’t afford to live where I work.
One thing I’ve noticed is that most American cities contain huge, populous suburbs that exert strong political control over the urban core. So in my city the actual dense urban neighborhoods only get one of five votes on the city council (let alone the county where we have straight up nazis on board). This results in an inability to implement many of the policies that we here in the city know will be beneficial, solely because residents in the other 4 suburban districts want to maintain their ability to drive through and park at desirable downtown amenities. In my opinion this represents a failure of democracy because our neighborhoods have very little say in rule making or development even in our immediate surroundings.
It is far less this and far more developers and builders with limited imagination and limited government requirements building subdivisions with thousands of homes that are 10-20 minute drives from commercial districts, combined with state and local governments that are afraid of the political fallout from exercising the right of eminent domain to create trail corridors, so trails are virtually impossible to connect for any distance (except for abandoned rail beds).
EVs can also act as a battery for the home and a back up generator. A lot more useful than just a car. Now I know this sublulemmy is urbanist, but the sorts of people to buy a car don’t live in a city.
Great idea, but they are taking it too far. People should be allowed to have a car, but it should be parked at the edge of the neighborhood and only be allowed to come in for loading and unloading of heavy things.
That way you have all the benefits and almost no inconvenience at all. We have that in many places in Denmark and it works great.
I would take it one step further and say there should probably be small (single lane) roads that run through the neighborhood or an underground carpark with a few freight elevators that run directly into the buildings. Why? For a same reason you mentioned that they should allow cars. If you get a new fridge, imagine trying to walk that sucker from the street to your apartment. You probably wouldn’t need very many freight elevators or access roads to significantly decrease the amount of effort required to get bulky and/or heavy objects to your apartment while still maintaining the general feel and spirit of a car-less community.
You really don’t need new fridges that often, the couple times you do just put them on boards on casters and shove. If you can’t: ask your neighbors, it’s a good bonding experience.
It’s not just one street, though. It’s a series of connected streets. They’re actually quite comparable to superblocks in Aarhus, Copenhagen and Aalborg.
People should be allowed to have a car, but it should be parked at the edge of the neighborhood and only be allowed to come in for loading and unloading of heavy things
Yeah, instead of flooring it to the cliff of climate change, we shift gear to a leisurely cruise to the climate change cliff.
Sure, it’s better. But EVs aren’t being pushed because they’re better, they’re being pushed because if they didn’t, then they wouldn’t be able to sell cars at all.
To be fair, getting rid of capitalism and stopping climate change, as powerful of a 1-2 punch it would be, is probably the most difficult challenge of our life. Incremental change might work. We already have a reactionary half of the country that wants to shoot the other because they think the other wants to make them stop eating red meat and take away their gas stoves.
So, what’s the solution that fixes this for EVERYONE? It’s not about inconviencing people it’s about getting people on board with the solution. And the people who need to be on board with the solution think the problem is a hoax.
It’s wild but it actually is. BEVs produce around 30% fewer emissions per km than ICEs if you include every emmission on both sides.
With better manufactoring and better energy mix, you could expect maybe 40% fewer emissions compared to ICEs in a couple decades in the EU (likely much worse in the U.S. and other less democratic places).
That’s not nothing and an amazing feat of engineering for sure but still nowhere near sustainable because the baseline (ICE) is just incredibly bad. 30-40% less than “incredibly bad” is simply not “good” when we actually need to be as close to 100% as possible.
If we shifted all current ICE transport to BEVs, that’d at best be a very small step in the right direction, not a solution in any shape or form.
We actually cannot put every single person on the planet into ther own 1-3t metal box to move them around, no matter the engine type of that box.
BS. You’re assuming current (or is that past) levels of renewable energy and no recycling. Sure mining and processing done rare earths is polluting and energy intensive, but it gets cleaner every year based simply on increased renewable energy. Also, most of these metals are infinitely reusable, and just aren’t yet because it’s not worth it until they’re widely used
You’re assuming current (or is that past) levels of renewable energy and no recycling.
See the 40% figure. It assumes realistically achievable goals in the EU for the next decade or two.
most of these metals are infinitely reusable, and just aren’t yet because it’s not worth it until they’re widely used
That’s not the problem. The problem is that it’s not economical to recycle them. You technically could recycle them in the present day but mining new resources and throwing the old stuff into a landfill is just cheaper and I don’t see that changing any time soon, especially not in undemocratic neo-“liberal” places such as the U.S.
This argument also misses that the current demand for transport is much smaller than the future demand will likely be. We aren’t even close to putting every human on earth into their own metal box yet; that insanity is still in front of us if we continue like we have been the past century.
You really ought to step back and compare the amount of lithium needed to be mined vs the current fossil fuel production. There a vast difference. Then adjust it for the Lithium being infinitely reusable, vs fossil fuels not at all.
I would love to see more and more car free cities and other urban sprawling, but I have to say, this centralized business model where this developer is providing all the amenities, passes for the near by rail, paying rent to this developer, basically everything goes through them, they even had an app for the community, this is not a viable solution. What happens when this company is not able to sustain the spending or goes bankrupt, or worse sells majority share to an equity company. A decentralized model that goes through local government is a better option and not through for profit company. Even better option is to start from city center not a separate community on the edge of the city. I know what I’m saying sounds impossible in America, and with lobbying buy auto makers and other large corporate overlords, it probably is impossible. Social change can bring about the difference.
On the bright side, it may be that someone doing it this way can be the inspiration for communities allowing it, now that they can see someone else do it first
Cars itself are actually only a small part of climate change. The major part of it is form construction, planes, and electricity. We can fix electricity with sustainable energy, fixing planes is a lot harder as of now. Fixing construction seems impossible for now.
We’ll run out of time before we we hit zero. We are already too fast to break before the cliff. All we can hope for is a soft landing, and we need everything for that. Even nuclear energy (go 100% on nuclear!)
The largest sources of transportation greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (21%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%).
Driving accounts for a larger percentage of emissions than you’d think - something like 14% of emissions are gasoline alone.
Electric cars have about half the lifecycle emissions of gas cars, so that’s equivalent to a ~7% reduction in emissions - more if the grid goes solar.
That said, replacing suburban sprawl with traditional denser streetcar suburbs like you see in the Netherlands would be a much bigger reduction in emissions.
I think it’s cool in theory, but the area is having a housing accessibility crisis, and it seems to be part of that problem and uses this format to hide that.
I don’t know, it looks fairly accessible. I’m not sure someone with a mobility issue that makes it necessary to have a car at the home directly would find any reason to desire living in a “walkable” neighborhood, though.
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