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City roads should be ‘ripped out completely’ to fight pollution, says government adviser
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Car brains are out in force for this thread, lol.
Apparently, if you can't transit products by car or truck, directly to the front-door of every business, the city will collapse.
That there are cities that have actually done this doesn't seem to stop them insisting it's impossible.
Something I think is sort of ironic is that in my neighborhood most of the last mile delivery happens on bike. This isn't because of a lack of automobile infrastructure but because there are too many automobiles. Nowhere to park or even idle the van for a short time.
I do also suspect it's more convenient for the delivery person to hop off a bike at each stop than it would be to park a car and get out etc.
If I were a city planner I'd integrate that system into my strategy. Ripping out every road is of course hyperbole and clickbait, but ripping out every other road seems like a no brainer. But I seriously doubt converting 3/4 or more of the roads for autos into pedestrian/bike/tram/greenspace would shake things up too bad. Just make sure to keep main arteries open for automobiles and ensure there's centralized parking garages (street parking is a blight) within a decent walking distance and I think people who need to have a car in the city will get used to it fast.
Hey so I come from a european city from 778, with most of the streets having been the same for over 500 years now.
Heineken truck drivers manage to supply bars and restaurants throughout the city with little to no problems and most of that is pedestrian zoning with exceptions for deliveries and it works quite well.
This is an excellent point too - removing streets for general use doesn't necessarily also exclude commercial delivery use and so forth
Name five, with populations higher than 50,000.
You know there are dozens of major cities that have converted major roads, and entire precincts, to foot traffic only... right?
Turns out it's pretty easy to transport inventory in hand trolleys a few blocks as most major cities, especially business districts, are flat as fuck.
"converted major roads" is very different from "ripped out completely"
I actually live next to a few places that have done this... with one or two streets for about 3 blocks in a downtown area... and they all have streets on the backsides to handle cargo delivery and trash pickup... so again, not "ripped out completely".
The great thing about FOOT traffic, is you don't need roads. You only need paths (e.g. the sidewalk) to bike or trolley inventory around.
How about YOU provide evidence of ANYWHERE converting blocks of a suburb or city to parkland, and suddenly facing the supply chain crisis you hypothesise? If you can't, then your argument is imaginary and based on nothing but your own biases... and maybe you should support change until there's reasonable evidence that it doesn't work... and no, a sample size of one is not evidence.
There isn't any township of any appreciable size (>50k pop) that has completely ripped out road infrastructure that I know of. I can't prove a negative.
Do you have an example of a location that has done so?
Point me to where someone is suggesting this? Sounds like a strawman
That's what the article is talking about.
Where does it say all roads? I think it's pretty clear in context that they're not suggesting that
And? I mean, sure it could technically be interpreted that way, but with only three words of the original quote, "all roads" is a pretty unkind reading IMO. More likely the article has deliberately introduced ambiguity to stoke exactly the outrage you exhibit.
You've bought into a strawman if you believe the intention is to remove all road infrastructure from an entire city. No city on earth would ever do that.
Imagine if every second parallel street were a grass strip, instead of a road. Fire trucks, ambulances, vans, etc could still drive down them as needed, and nowhere would be more than a couple of blocks from a road, but regular traffic capacity would be cut by 50%, and so would pollution.
Fuck_cars on Lemmy is great, I feel like I'm really fighting for the future every time I come here.
On Reddit it was just people trying to out meme each other
Lol
These people also forget that "delivery trucks allowed" is common. Cutting out 95% of cars and leaving delivery vehicles is fine.
What is your proposed alternative solution for logistics in any moderately dense urban area? Like never mind New York, you couldn't make this work in Little Rock.
Why don't you read the article? It's all spelled out right there.
Currently, no. But with mixed zoning, it would become more amenable to change over time.
This is a fantasy. It can't be implemented in large scale in any practical sense.
Centralization of distribution and centralization of production is always more efficient. You aren't going to put dairy farms next to apartment buildings next to orchards next to paper manufacturing plants next to microchip fabricators next to restaurants next to family homes next to waste water treatment next to hospitals next to bookstores next to power generators next to garbage incinerators next to grocery stores...
These things get separated from each other for good reason, and running rail lines to all of them will never be practical. There will always be a need to fill the gap with small, independently powered vehicles for cargo transport.
You know, for someone who complains about other people making strawman of them, you sure do seem fond of it yourself.
Someone: "We should reduce our dependency on cars and shift our infrastructure planning toward other modes of transport wherever possible."
You: "SO YOU WANT TO TEAR OUT ALL ROADS EVERYWHERE AND EXECUTE PEOPLE FOR OWNING CARS?!?1!?!1?"
K
I worry more about emergency services access...
Emergency services have a lot of problems delivering care in current city traffic.
Sure, but if they don't have any roads to travel on what then?
But I've seen another comment mentioning the distinction between roads and streets so I guess that might explain why I can't imagine how that would be realistic.
In the Netherlands they use bike lanes.
A two way bike lane is wide enough for emergency vehicles like an ambulance, and bikers get out of the way.
They even exist with a camera and AI to automatically detect emergency vehicles.