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.
Hopefully some of the people sitting in parliament will read this. In many cities we still have to fight for bicycle infrastructure. Car centric city designs should really start going out of fashion
The worst is when they install bike infrastructure that will just randomly end and dump you onto a busy street, and then complain no one is using the fancy new bike lanes…
Have some of these here. Absolutely wild, that the bike lane ends where it would become useful: Before a traffic light, so that you have to take part in the traffic jam of cars.
But what am I even talking about. Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
The current plan where I live, is to chuck the bicycles on the footpath with pedestrians.
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.
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.The “smart” traffic lights idea is very interesting, never heard of it. Which country is that?
Germany (city of Potsdam)
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.