Car travel is such a weird thing. The other day I was walking on the driver side of a wide street where cars were passing me by very fast. Most of us are usually an arms length away from passing cars when we do that, roughly an arms length away from being hit at 20+ mph, yet humans do this careful beam walking without flinching. It’s the American version of Indians riding the roof of a train. If you goto a third world country, they are even more acclimated to insanely dangerous traffic conditions (no traffic laws being followed, cars flying out from every angle). The whole thing is insanity yet everyone is just going along with it.
A life built around car commutes is the outcome of a poorly thought out society. It had such stupid repercussions like racial segregation and the absurdity that everyone gets their own house along with the vertical airspace on top of it (exceedingly selfish). Along with that, it’s dangerous as fuck.
Someone needs to suggest dropping the speed limit across the board in America. Unfortunately the MAGA people will straight boycott roads if we do that (unfortunately?). Most people I talk to in Texas will concede the highways are full of maniacs.
Interestingly, removing this illusion of a safe "beam" or division is part of safer road design for mixed traffic areas like city streets.
When you remove physical divides between "road" and a "footpath" drivers become more aware that they are dangerous and slow down on their own. Making roads narrower has a similar effect, and removing car parking helps remove that divide and removes the blindspots they create.
There are many roads that should either stop pretending to be safe for pedestrians and turn into highways, or lower the speed limit and redesign the layout to suit the mixed traffic nature of the areas. Doesn't have to be extreme just be honest about the real use of the roads. If it's actually mostly pedestrians, suck it up, make it safe, go drive on the other faster roads.
You can also narrow the space between the curbs in which cars can go and achieve the same effect, while keeping pedestrians grade separated from traffic.
It would go a long way if we could eliminate spaces where a driver can exceed 50 km/hr (31 MPH) while menacing unprotected users of the street.
One of the things that is particularly strange about traveling to the United States is that you pretty much have no choice but to rent a car or at least have access to a car in some way, unless you’re going to be spending all your time in a place like New York City. But in nearly every other major western destination, certainly throughout much of Europe, it’s never even a thought that you would need to rent a car. I know plenty of grown adults here in Europe they don’t even have a drivers license! It really makes life a lot more convenient when the world does not revolve around an automobile.
Merely dropping speed limits doesn’t work. Speed limits not enforced by road design such as road/lane width (real or by parked cars) or other features (bulb outs, neck downs) are speed suggestions.
Such is life in dense cities where workplaces are concentrated. And pace of life requires humans to take shorter path which is safe enough. At least it’s much safer than in the era of the horses. And sanitary conditions are much better.
Density is fundamentally incompatible with car-friendly cities and a large amount of road. In general, the denser a city becomes, the more people will go by foot, cycle, or use public transport, especially in Europe.
Oh it is. You get traffic jams and that’s not exactly car-friendly. But still people drive. On top of that, walking on a sidewalk when a bus pass close by is much more interesting than a car passing. And then there’s all the commercial traffic that is necessary to serve a dense city.
And many cities, especially here in Europe, are dense enough to need some mode of transit. Especially with workplaces concentrated either in office parks or industrial districts by the city. But not multi million megapolies that warrant a sweet metro system. And that’s where cars shine.
Although after living in one of the largest cities on earth with a very nice train system… there’s still plenty of traffic. And people still drive. Especially those who can’t afford living in city core and end up in cheaper more remote locations.
On top of that, that’d likely mean highways torn up and replaced by narrow streets. Which would mean more traffic closer to people on sidewalks.
The reverse of this happened here in backwaters of Eastern Europe. Before there was no city bypasses and in-city highways. Traffic was tenfold smaller because there were much much fewer private vehicles. But most of it was busses, lorries and so on. Long distance driving was done through downtowns. Nowadays there’s much more private traffic. But there’re bypasses routing away a lot of long distance traffic. A lot of city traffic is on isolated motor-only streets. Of course they waste space. But at the same time people don’t walk along those streets so big portion of traffic is not passing by anybody’s shoulder.
Why more distance? Streets wouldn’t get wider. Rather if you try to dense-up the city, streets will go narrower.
Besides complete hellholes like 80s US from the famous parking lot pictures, when trying to dense up the city, wide major streets would go first being built up. At least here there massive parking lots to just build on exist mostly on the outskirts. There’s no point in building on them. Going closer to downtown, lots of underground parking with private property on top. Some multi-floor private garages that cost a lot of money to build and unlikely to get torn down any time soon, especially if street parking was gone making it even bigger deficit. If you remove street parking, there won’t be space to fit in anything meaningful without rebuilding stuff around it. Which is not gonna happen in meaningful scale in sane timespan.
> Why more distance? Streets wouldn’t get wider. Rather if you try to dense-up the city, streets will go narrower.
......yes?
You make the paved street narrower, allowing more distance between the lanes and the sidewalk.
And I didn't say anything about changing the density of the overall city. I'm talking about places where people are already walking but they're next to tons of cars.
> If you remove street parking, there won’t be space to fit in anything meaningful without rebuilding stuff around it.
The original complaint was people being within arms length of high speed cars. The meaningful thing you do is make that stop being the case.
Here paved part, besides the major isolated streets, is already quite as narrow as standard buses and lorries allow. Also, where streets were seen as too wide, when rebuilding, sometimes sidewalks got even narrower. The used space was either used for greenery (which is nice), dedicated bike paths (also good) or on-street commerce (which IMO sucks since I prefer wider sidewalks).
Usually getting rid of traffic ideas involve densing up the cities by building more. The idea is that once you remove cars, people will want to live closer to PoIs. And more housing is needed. Hoping that people will just switch to public transit, from what I see, just doesn’t work - business and entertainment moves to car-OK parts of the city. There needs to be cheap housing and strict regulations preventing sprawl too.
And I’m saying that „just“ solving cars at high speed passing by is very complex.
Roads take up an enormous amount of space, as does parking. We could capture significant real estate opportunities back from roads in cities that have multi-lane roads going through the CBD (mine has like a dozen criss crossing it). It wouldn't be an overnight thing, but close off a block of road, rezone it and sell it off, you'll get a bunch of new high density buildings that are walkable (since any roads going through will have to be narrow)
And then you get business parks on the outskirts of the city. Because otherwise both employees and visitors complain about parking. Which makes cheaper suburbs more compelling. And some people living downtown driving to workplaces in outskirts of the city.
At least that’s what is happening in my whereabouts. I remember when I was kid downtown was prime location for regular shopping and doing daily business. Now all of that moved to big box stores along major traffic arteries. Nowadays downtown is just a tourist trap with super expensive boutiques. I still go there to take a walk once a year or so, but besides that there’s no reason to there anymore for vast majority of people. But suburbs life is flourishing… With shops and services that are needed for every day life. Cheap and good eateries. Even casual entertainment is moving away from the city core.
All in all, not sure if it’s good or bad. I couldn’t afford living in downtown even in old era. And now I can live comfy life in suburbs. Not helping much to lower total amount of traffic though.
Train travel is such a weird thing. The service, staff, stock, pricing, timetable etc is set by civil servants and politicians 250 miles away.
The ticketing system is Byzantine and if you make a mistake you get a fine or a criminal record, unless you look like a thug, in which case the staff rarely bother.
Tickets are miraculously priced similar to driving in many instances despite a train looking nothing like a car. In various cases, more expensive than driving
You can be late because a politician 200 miles away annoyed the staff so they decide not to turn up.
It also turns out services on Sunday ran on good will (overtime), so the annoyed staff who get ok pay rises now realised they don't want the overtime so good luck travelling on a Sunday in quite a few areas.
Because of low enforcement of infringements by thugs, they are drawn to the service. You'd think your very high ticket price would include some kind of security? No. Fuck you.
When the trains break down you are expected to be OK with being trapped on a train for hours with no open windows or working toilets because of some "greater good" and insufficient emergency response
When I lived in London, people waiting for the tube were leas than an arm’s length away when it rushed in. Blew my mind. Eventually I got used to it and did the same.
The difference is that the tube driver (assuming there even is one) can't just decide to take a slight turn from the planned route, while the car driver really might.
It does happen, it happened to me — a driver was distracted (because they were texting while driving) and they veered from the traffic flow and I was hit at 40 mph. The EMS worker who responded to the scene told me two things: 1. They almost never pull people alive from this kind of accident, 2. This kind of head-on, no brakes, distracted driver accident was happening more and more. This was 10 years ago.
Yeah but look at how normalized it is. All you need to do is slightly misstep, out of the thousands of steps you take, to bump your head on a passing train. You think it’s not possible (part of the trance) but all the parameters are set up so that the slot machine eventually hits the jackpot. You’re 12 inches away from a projectile, and you are to repeat the loop daily for a lifetime. The odds are the odds.
A life built around car commutes is the outcome of a poorly thought out society. It had such stupid repercussions like racial segregation and the absurdity that everyone gets their own house along with the vertical airspace on top of it (exceedingly selfish). Along with that, it’s dangerous as fuck.
Someone needs to suggest dropping the speed limit across the board in America. Unfortunately the MAGA people will straight boycott roads if we do that (unfortunately?). Most people I talk to in Texas will concede the highways are full of maniacs.