They brought it upon themselves. This is being pushed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Party of Deutschland (SPD), which were confirmed another legislature period of 5 years in April with 64% voter participation.
Decisions are made by those who show up. Now they'll have to live with these idiots in parliament until 2026. I feel for them, but if ~40% of voters can't be bothered to show up to the urns, you have a large part to play in the reason for this even being possible.
If Europeans (in general) love sleeper trains, why are there so little of those? Even in Russia, sleeper trains are still the main and preferred way of transportation between most regional centers (for the majority of travelers I would say it is “default” one), while in the EU most destinations are not even covered by a sleeper. I hope new companies like “European Sleeper” blossom because I personally prefer sleepers very much, but to say “Europeans love those” is untrue, since it is still mostly something exotic.
It’s more of a comeback moment and it takes time to reno all the old trains. I love the Nightjet but let’s be honest, the cars themselves are very funky.
I live 15 minutes walking from a European Sleeper stop and can’t wait to use it.
There were many more of these lines like 20 years ago. But these idiots abandoned these lines because for whatever reason. I’ll never understand why plane is developed and supported like it is and train is completely abandoned. Our politicians are useless shits is my best hypothesis at this point.
Public transport needs much less space than cars. Especially if you put all the parking lots into the equation. So much space in cities is wasted by cars that do not even move most of the day.
Also delivery vehicles? The hipster organically grown vegetables in the local bodega at the foot of your apartment building in your walkable urban utopia don’t arrive there by magic.
The point is that the whole thing should be designed differently. We should focus these spaces around people rather than cars. There probably wouldn’t even be roads there at all. Streets would be fewer and with more space between them, and they would be designed to defer to pedestrian traffic more often, rather than the other way around. Bus stops would be on those streets, and pedestrians would walk a distance away to board them, while moving through safe, walking-focused sidewalks and avenues on the way.
🤦♀️ I literally gave you the space requirements of cars vs PT in a city that already has stellar public transport compared to the US, and you still can only come up with this utterly lobotomized hot take. Please tell me you’re not developing something important.
It’s almost like everyone would have more space if cars wouldn’t eat up 50% of the available space, while public transport and bikes only get 4% and 2%… :O Ö O: .O.
And this is in an area of Berlin where only 13% of trips are taken by car while bikes and public transport account for 32% and 22%.
Buses are better than cars but they’re still the worst form of public transport. They pollute like cars. They’re dangerous like cars. And they move as slowly as the traffic, like cars.
my dude you do realize that’s exactly what people did in the past before cars existed, right? There’s a video of olden gothenburg that shows kids running in front of the trams for fun!
And if you go there now you’ll see people crossing precisely wherever the fuck they please, because it’s just inherently way easier to deal with a couple public transport vehicles per minute than it is 50 cars.
As someone who experiences pain while walking essentially any distance over 100m, I don't want to walk for my groceries. But it's nice to have a store nearby. I really want an e-bike, but since I need a car and am already forced to pay for one, I can't really afford to have both.
Yeah, walking definitely isn’t suitable for everyone. What we need is dense communities with layered and diverse transit options. High walkability, abundant protected bike infrastructure, and accessible mass and local transit.
Walkability is a matter of urban design. Only 20% of the US lives somewhere rural; 80% live in a city, suburb, or small town. We’re taking about how the 80% shops.
Walkability is about lot size, density in general, mixed use development (putting houses near restaurants and shops), parking minimums, that sort of thing.
Walkable areas tend to be connected by public transit. Look at Amsterdam - to get to work, you might bike to the train station, take a train, then walk or bike to the office. You don’t have to walk clear across the city; public transit connects walkable spaces.
Compare that with American suburban design, where shops are put far from houses, on ugly-ass loud dangerous stroads with comically oversized parking lots. You don’t walk anywhere because anywhere you’d want to walk to is incredibly unpleasant to exist in. People will literally drive in their car to a walking path or a gym treadmill.
It also hurts, and since I'm not very active I don't have the physical stamina to bike distances much longer than a couple of km. I biked to work for a short while when I lived closer to my job but now I can't.
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.
“Ward-Waller alleged that Caltrans improperly described the first project as “pavement rehabilitation” when it will actually widen the road to accommodate new lanes. Because of that, she said, it’s illegally using state funds that are intended only for road maintenance, not widening.”
She’s a hero for blowing the lid on that. Super sketchy and gross misuse of funds.
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.
fuckcars
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.