Comment by xiaq
14 hours ago
Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands (sometimes with limited access for delivery and emergency vehicles), a trend fortunately becoming popular in other European cities now.
The “urban” in the title is a bit misleading, this intersection is definitely more suburban, or on the boundary of an urban center. (Or rather, the author has a different definition of urban - in my definition cities like den Bosch are really just a small medieval urban core surrounded by continuous medium-density suburban neighborhoods.)
In my experience, cars are discouraged from city centres, but not banned. You can drive your car all around Amsterdam, although you’ll have many one way streets and parking is going to very expensive for non-residents… and it’s hard (but not impossible) to find street level parking. Amsterdam has a number of car parks in the outskirts that are cheap if you can show that you used public transport afterwards.
The result is that people use their car (if they have one, still quite common esp. for families) to get out of the city, or big errands, but use bike or public transport for day to day trips.
Actual car free zones exist in cities across Europe but tend to be pretty small and constrained to the hyper centre, like the church square and the major shopping streets. Not that I’m opposed to them being bigger but that seems rare at this point.
> Such old urban places would just be car-free in the Netherlands
that's the hardest part that everyone always ignores.
first you have to remove cars from the streets, than it's becomes easier to implement biking infrastructures.
I've been a long time petitioner to completely ban car traffic from the neighborhood where I live, but it's been a lost battle in the past 20 years.
Changing human habits it's harder than it looks.