Comment by panick21_
3 years ago
> You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it.
Its not about 'snapping your finger'. Neither Netherlands or Switzerland built their systems from 1 day to the other.
You need to make decision to change and then consistently and incrementally work on it. Put it in your standards and invest ever $ you have for new roads to that instead.
You need to change your tax policy so that horrible inefficient land uses like parking lots cost a lot more. You need to enable mixed use development so these parking lots can be built on.
> To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians.
I'm sorry that is complete and utter nonsense. Like seriously, completely insane.
If you look into some urbanist and city planning literature you will see that lots of places where there used to be total car shitshows, are now beautiful. Often you would never have guessed that just 10-20 years earlier it was horrible road and a parking lot.
Again, small and incremental steps. Here are some really basic steps you can take:
- Remove parking requirements
- Slow speed of cars
- Don't allow turn right on red
- Make the lanes thinner
- Make the sidewalk broader, maybe add some trees
- Take one of the existing lanes and add painted bike lanes, later add protection for those lanes
- Rezone for mixed use (specially existing commercial zones)
- Change property tax policy to discourage sub-optimal land use
I could literally keep going on and on. Non of this, requires you to demolish anything.
Specifically for the US, there is whole movement about incrementally improving your city, see Strong Towns (https://www.strongtowns.org/). They have lots of podcasts and books. Specially: 'Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity'.
They also point out in detail with real data how these changes make your city safer and economically much better (They have some seriously amazing visualization of city finances that shows how such chances can improve cities).
And this is not some hippy organization, these are coming from a somewhat conservative small towns perspective.
Honestly your attitude of 'we are stuck with this' is horrible. I can understand frustration and bleak outlook, about the situation. But put your hope into incremental low cost change, not some techno futurism and you will be less disappointed.
What's wrong with "turn right on red"? It'd be a big problem in that exact form in Australia, but as a cyclist especially I'd rather we had the equivalent "turn left on red" law, and to be honest, cyclists can generally get away with it anyway. But I can't see why it would really be a huge issue if it was allowed for cars, unless they were persistently ignoring pedestrians/cyclists and turning into their path as they crossed in front of you.
The big one for me is traffic lights - cyclists/pedestrians should be able to trigger traffic/pedestrian lights to turn green instantly in most cases (with some reasonable lower limit on the amount of time they've been red for, although ideally all traffic lights in urban areas would be hooked up to sensors able to determine if there was any traffic approaching), and ideally approaching cyclists should be able to trigger them without even stopping to press a button - I gather they have something like this in Copenhagen. There's realistically no way to set up traffic light sequences so that they suit all modes of travel, but they're often especially bad for cyclists, and the act of having to stop and start all the time is far more onerous (and even dangerous, esp. if you're clipped in) for cyclists than it is for cars.
Turn right on red kills cyclists and pedestrians. It was always unsafe but the introduced it in the 1970 during the oil crisis with the idea that there would be less idling on red.
In most cases you shouldn't even need traffic lights at all but there is certainty a lot you can do with traffic lights if you optimize them, there are lots of videos on this from the Netherlnads. There they have separate sensors for different transport modes and also multiple levels so the intersection can respond smartly based on lots of info about what is coming from what direction. It can also let people cross half the road to the protect middle in a smart way. Forcing to press a button is horrible design!
But this is just one of many tools. Having flat bicycle and pedestrian ways where cars have to go over bumbs. There are many methods that are used.
The most import one is just slowing cars down cars.
Netherlands deliberately bans cars from some streets to kill certainty routes completely and forcing people to take different longer routes. That means also less cars on that route even in the parts that the car could have taken.