I’d like to see it start with no-car zones around downtown centers, maybe even just a single street with good park-n-ride support, and expand into dense areas as needed, with car and carless connections between them
just_another_person@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Works great if you have smaller spaces, able bodied people, and the infrastructure in place to support it.
Sineljora@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 13 hours ago
Regarding able bodied people, pedestrian and cycling infrastructure is generally superior for people with disabilities. Many can’t drive a car, and the same infrastructure that serves bikes can serve e-bikes, mopeds, mobility scooters, etc.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
You seem to think I’m somehow making a statement AGAINST ped infrastructure,.and I’m clearly not. Just saying the ability to have it be useful requires a lot of stuff the US just doesn’t have. The US was too focused on Suburban sprawl for way too long to suddenly just make this a viable alternative to cars. That’s the issue.
tomalley8342@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You seem to think I’m somehow making a statement AGAINST ped infrastructure,.
It is probably because you have been using the exact talking points used by people who are against ped infrastructure.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 10 hours ago
What lol. Arguing pedestrian infrastructure is not useful is arguing against it.
Suburban sprawl is an issue. But it is solvable by building more density and improving pedestrian infrastructure. It’s not insurmountable.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Never even said it wasn’t useful. Not sure where you’re getting that from at all. Original comment was even in support under the right circumstances. Think you missed something.
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
For what it’s worth, dense infrastructure is possible everywhere, even in large spaces like the United States. It just doesn’t get built because the people tasked with making such decisions choose not to for various reasons.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
The density in a specific location isn’t the issue, it’s the space BETWEEN all other locations. Too much sprawl to begin with requires extensive work of a long period of time to even be able to do something this.
Also helps that the cities this works for were built for walking a long time before cities in the US had even developed a unique urban footprint. East Coast cities established in the 1500-1700’s would be the closest in design to European cities.
blarghly@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Eeeeh… We don’t need to go back to 1500 to find good urban design. We had good urban design happening all the way up to the second world war. In fact, cities built around streetcar networks in the early 20th century, like Denver and San Francisco, could be considered even more walkable than older cities like Boston, since the efficient streetcar network made more parts of the city easily accessible to people travelling on foot.
Meanwhile, I will note that while reforming sprawling urban areas will take a lot of work, it doesn’t have to take a lot of taxpayer money. Reforming sprawling areas takes a three-pronged approach: reforming zoning laws and building codes; enacting pigouvian taxes and fees to incentivize pro-social spending; and reforming infrastructure and transit services.
Zoning and building code reform, like removing minimum lot size requirements, allowing parcel splitting, removing setback requirements, eliminating R1 zoning and making mixed use zoning universal, streamlining permitting processes, and freely publishing building codes makes it possible to build more densely (especially for individual homeowners and small developers), and to create businesses (like gyms, cafes, and corner stores) near where people live.
Pigouvian taxes and fees, like carbon taxes, vehicle registration fees, highway use and exit tolls, land value taxes, and utility connection maintenance fees, parking fees, incentivize people to stop doing things which harm the public good or hoard public resources. Tolling highway exits into dense urban cores, for example, encourages people to take transit into their downtowns rather than taking up valuable urban space with their cars. And land value taxes encourage people with valuable land (like that in urban downtowns) to do something useful with it, like build a mixed use apartment building - rather than speculating on it by keeping it as a surface parking lot while the land appreciates in value because everyone else around them are building something useful.
Infrastructure and transit services are things likeaiing BRT lines, increasing transit service to run frequently enough that people dont need to plan around it, and creating protected bike lanes.
But importantly, the first two prongs take minimal public funding. Rough implementations could be deployed tomorrow, and then we would just sit back and wait for individuals to make their own worlds better.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 13 hours ago
Do you need to visit every single location in your city state or county? Or do you need to reach certain amenities and would happily use a closer one of similar quality?
Density matters more than size. People aren’t shopping on the other side of the country. They go to the most convenient option.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Well, you’re either unaware of, or just ignoring a lot of things that do not fit into your tidy explanation.
Every been the Bay Area in the US? You know what it takes to ride a bike from one side of SF to the other and any direction? What about crossing a bridge to Oakland? What about crossing the GGB to get to literally any other city on the other side?
Also,.most major US cities were not built for walking, only East Coast earlier cities. Let me ramble off a bunch that discount your point: Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Denver, Philadelphia, and even Washington DC.
Your immediate response is going to be something like “Well they WERE originally…”, but that doesn’t matter. Maybe 100+ years ago, but that’s not where we live. We live in the reality of now, and that reality is that none of the cities are AS accessible by walking or bike as they are with cars. If not Topography, then the general logistics of where jobs vs living spaces are located.
People don’t have the luxury of choosing where they get to live in the US anymore in proximity and convenience of their commute to work. Just not the reality of things. No argument you might have will beat the consumer logic of finding the most ideal place to live first, and worrying about the commute second. Likely to be by car.
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Given several more developed nations have solved the distance problem using trains, I don’t think space between cities is much more than a talking point. Need somewhere to put the farmlands anyhow.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yes it has been solved in other countries…with 1/5 the land mass of the US. That’s the problem as I mentioned.
Every major US city aside from LA has both local and long distance train networks, and they are heavily utilized. These cities were not planned around walking or rail though. Most US cities didn’t even hit what constitutes as “Urban” density until after the advent of the car,.so everything is built around cars. Reclaiming land to focus on ped or rail after the fact is in quite difficult.
Case in point, the California high speed rail project which has blown Billions of dollars over more than a decade and has yet to manifest anything usable. That’s just one state, and only serving a handful of cities. Doing this in a national scale as Japan has done is just not going to happen when Air Travel is faster.