Grenoble also banned all ads in 2014 and put in a lot of trees. It is truly an audacious move, yet completely rational. My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar covered parking spaces. Add car sharing, better public transportation, urban agriculture, community gardens and parks: soon you'll have an efficient paradise of a city.
Unfortunately mayors of cities in the Netherlands do not have sufficient power to change rules like these, its the state which makes these rules. This is why we won't see such a thing in my country. There are progressive cities where it could fly, but overall the Netherlands has become extremely conservative.
The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub. If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first. If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
For me going to work is either a 20 minute car ride, with parking right in front of my house and right in front of work. Or it is a 10 minute walk, 45 minute bus ride where I likely have to stand and then another 5 minute walk. And I can't work past 20:00 because that's my last bus. Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
And no I don't even live in a village. Population of 140.000 people and I work in a city of 300.000.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work
I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks like barely not to me, according to this data: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you can download is much more readable than the table in the webpage)
0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023, 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is the case though.
Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car) that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority": https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED
> Inwoners van Nederland legden in 2022 gemiddeld 7,4 kilometer per dag af om van en naar het werk te gaan. Ruim 70 procent van de reizigerskilometers van en naar het werk werd met de auto afgelegd, meestal als bestuurder. De trein werd gebruikt voor 10 procent van deze kilometers, de gemiddelde afstand per treinverplaatsing van en naar het werk was 42,8 kilometer. Fietsen was goed voor 29 procent van de verplaatsingen van en naar het werk en voor 8 procent van de afgelegde afstand voor dit doel. De gemiddelde verplaatsingsafstand op de fiets was 4,7 kilometer. Minder dan 0,6 procent van de totale afstand om van en naar het werk te gaan werd te voet overbrugd.
Google Translate:
> In 2022, residents of the Netherlands traveled an average of 7.4 kilometers per day to and from work. More than 70 percent of the passenger kilometers to and from work were covered by car, usually as a driver. The train was used for 10 percent of these kilometers, the average distance per train trip to and from work was 42.8 kilometers. Cycling accounted for 29 percent of the trips to and from work and for 8 percent of the distance traveled for this purpose. The average distance traveled by bike was 4.7 kilometers. Less than 0.6 percent of the total distance to and from work was covered on foot.
So if you remove the 15% WFH, I'm not awake enough to math that out but car travel is the overwhelming majority and bicycle commute is still negligible.
Really Japan is probably the gold standard but people find comfort because the Netherlands is Western and thus familiar. Despite having little dedicated biking infrastructure to speak of, bike rates are estimated in Tokyo at a very healthy 13%.
> If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be come a lot better first.
No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
> If public transit was a good option to get to work for people, more people would use it.
The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit because, for them, public transit is probably a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the center are driven by people that live in the periphery or even suburbs outside of the city.
So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they actually live there, and they will vote them out.
You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the mayors can just ignore them.
People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make at least minor improvements to public transit for them.
But again, you can restrict and make improvements in parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived as matching the restrictions anyway.
> No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
Getting people into public transit by making car ownership worse is how you get unhappy people. That is just unproductive and destructive. Make public transit better, that is how you get people out of cars and happy.
> The people that live in the city center probably already use public transit
No they don't. The 74% of The Netherlands lives in a city yet 66% of people commute to work by car. That goes to show that even for people living in cities, going to work by car is still the preferred method. I'm one of them, in the example I gave above it was three times faster to go to work by car.
> because they actually live there, and they will vote them out
That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality. Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
Part of making public transit better is making the car experience worse, necessarily. Because you need to take up time, and space, for PT. Unless you put all your trains underground, and build bike lines in an alternative (but parallel) universe. If you want an equal playing field, meaning both are given equal consideration, then naturally the car experience will be worse.
The inverse is also true. The public transport experience is bad now because the car experience is optimized.
> Make public transit better, that is how you get people out of cars and happy.
This is fantasy, you cannot snap your fingers and make this happen, nor are the people in charge incompetent. Never has a city "simply" made PT better at a pace that allowed for significant car reduction without making car users unhappy. Again, car users will always complain, unless the PT takes them less time to commute, which is physically impossible to accommodate for all car users.
> That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality.
No, car users have the "fuck you I got mine" mentality: they have a short commute because they are rich enough to pay for car space in the city, and want a perpetual right to this.
> Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will make it harder for poor people in the affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
Rich people live in the outskirts in big houses, but want to able to steamroll with their car right into the city center, regardless of the impact to people living in the center and along the way to it.
I can assure you that in The Netherlands, the rich people live in the cities. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The Hague. You need to earn in the top 5% if you want to buy a place there. The people commuting into the city by car provide the services for the people living there. Police officers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, teachers. Those people don't live in the city and with their work schedules often can only go by car.
You're confusing the ultra rich that live in penthouses in the financial district, with the rich that commute from the suburbs or wealthy periphery into the center.
> Police officers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers, teachers. Those people don't live in the city and with their work schedules often can only go by car.
They absolutely can go by PT, or relocate, as it has been proven by all the cities that successfully have restricted cars.
We cannot increase density in cities anymore, cars are not the solution because they simply don't scale and are not actually accessible to poor people.
Do you even live in The Netherlands, making such bizarre statements?
The top 5% earners are not the ultra rich. To even afford a 50 square meter apartment somewhat near the center of Amsterdam you need to be at least an engineer, lawyer or doctor earning six figures. Those people do not live in suburbs, that is where the people earning modal income live.
Is this some sort of American way of thinking you are projecting onto my country?
And where should those essential workers relocate to? They already live as close to the city as their lending/renting capabilities allow them. And no they can't all use public transit otherwise they likely would be using it already.
And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has 3700 people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
You have a distorted view of what "modal income" is. If you can afford to live in the suburbs and drive one car (per worker) into the city, then you are rich. The poor live in the periphery and walk, use PT, or carpool. Then, the ultra-rich can afford to live in penthouses in the financial district and will always weasel a way in to be able to drive (or get driven) in a SUV, they are irrelevant to the discussion.
You are relatively rich and want to have your way with your car and driving, and are using the poor as a bad excuse.
What do you think will happen, that the system will collapse? Trains and buses spilling with people, no essential workers, police and healthcare unavailable, chaos, anarchy?
No! Everything goes on normally in cities that have restricted car traffic. Because restrictions are gradual. If a job offer in the city center becomes less competitive (considering time and money), then it will attract different workers from better locations. And same for housing.
> And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has 3700 people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
Sure, if you want to make everything worse, you can keep dialing it up until it's too late. See any other major city in the world. There's an upper limit of what is acceptable, there not really a limit in decentralizing.
You don't need to buy a place to live in the cities. In Amsterdam, 70 percent of the places are for rent and over 2/3 of those are in the social sector (almost 50% of the total), meaning that there is a cap on the rent.
Can you provide a single study where people living in cities that reduced car dependency were "unhappy"?
Every single survey I've seen across Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany showed big support AFTER the changes were made (but a lot of hand wringing like yours BEFORE they were made).
The people that are usually unhappy are the ones that want to drag their SUVs in front of people living in city apartments and leave them there.
Who did they survey? The rich people living in the center of Amsterdam that can afford to not own a car? Or the poor people living in Purmerend that now have a worse commute than before?
Of course the people living in Amsterdam will answer the survey positively. It's not those people that are impacted. It's the poor person working at IKEA that now has an extra 30 minutes of commute because they imposed parking restrictions near their job. The rich Amsterdam city center person shopping at IKEA can take the metro because they can afford to live such a lifestyle.
Let's be real: you are not the poor person, you just want to ride your car for whatever reasons.
Poor people will chose a job that is nearer, rents and salaries adjust to job opportunities - it's a good thing to decentralize, we cannot keep concentrating more jobs and dwellers around already problematic zones.
Let's be real: you've never been poor. I have. When you're poor you don't "choose a job that's nearer". You get whatever you can take. If that's 2 hours commute each way, so be it. You need to eat and pay rent (at least in the US where there's not much in the way of welfare). The rich and poor alike drive, but the rich can live close to work and the poor often can't. The very poor take the bus if it's available and just eat the extra time commuting, which in my city is usually 3x the time driving. The bus is also a safety issue, my friends have been robbed waiting for the bus and after getting off the bus, driving is safer in this regard.
Yes I have been poor, probably more than you, and I have chosen any job that's near to survive. Before starting my career in IT, I once had my car wrecked and consequently lost my job. I had to take another job nearby and commute by bicycle. If you talk about poor people benefiting from car centric cities, then you are delusional either about what "poor" really means, or about the reality of relying on a car when you're poor.
Don't be absurd. If the poor person somehow could find no jobs closer than a 2 hour commute away, they should buy a second home closer to the job. This isn't rocket science.
>You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless they have a station right next to their door and their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be faster.
That's really not universally true. If I'm going in and out during commuting hours and drive to the commuter rail station, it's about a wash whether I take the train into the city or drive depending upon where I'm going and what local subway connection/walk I need to do.
It's pretty much useless outside of commuting hours though given limited train schedule and the fact that driving is faster at those times than rush hour. So I'll basically never take the train for an evening event.
You guys are lucky in the NL that you have the _option_ to bike, drive, public transport. Maybe driving is still the fastest but the others are still treated as first class citizens.
In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially outside of big cities.
“ In the US you couldn’t realistically bike anywhere nor does public transport go everywhere.”
This does, of course, depend entirely on where in the US you live. People commute by bike year round in Minneapolis, and it’s a stereotype for people in New York City to not have driving licenses because they take transit everywhere.
I'm unfamiliar with Minneapolis - sounds pretty amazing if there's a strong bicycle culture there, but not if "people" only means <1% of commuters. Bicycle enthusiasts live everywhere and are willing to make difficult or risky trips; we can't judge a city by whether or not hardcore bicyclists can survive there.
NYC is an extreme outlier, we love to see it, but about 98% of the US doesn't live in the area served by NYC transit. I am sure the population of Minneapolis is much smaller, too.
The vast majority of the US is prohibitively difficult to traverse by any mode except car. (Actually, it's usually a highly frustrating and dangerous experience by car, too.) I see reports of more than 60% of the population living in suburbs, which are, as a general rule, designed to discourage non-car travel.
NYC is also an outlier in that there's really no cultural expectation that you own a car and drive. As an adult professional, I'm not sure there's any other US city where I would choose not to do so simply because friends and activities are so often structured around owning a car and certainly being able to drive--even if there's decent transit. You can work around it to some degree (and I know a couple people who do) but I doubt I'd choose to.
In San Francisco it's common to not own a car, since parking is expensive and often not available and insurance is high also. At one point in the mid-90s I vaguely remember the ticket for parking illegally was less than the average parking space, until the city realized it. But SF is very small, so public transit/Uber/etc gives you many options to get around. Where I live now, if you have no car you go nowhere.
SF does have somewhat lower car ownership than the average American city. I know a couple in SF who don't own one. Though I'd observe that, in addition to muni and some cycling, they lean heavily on Uber, Zipcar, and conventional rentals so they're carless mostly in the sense that they don't own one and have to park it but they certainly use and drive cars in some form on an ongoing basis.
I will honestly take 20’s and dry over 40’s and wet. Until it gets in the deep negative numbers, I’ve never found cold to be a reason not to ride. You create heat when you ride, so comfort is easy to manage through layers.
I don't think they're designed explicitly to discourage non-car travel. It's quite easy to ride a bike around the suburbs and kids in particular do it all the time. It's just that as a function of everyone wanting a quarter acre lot and cul-de-sacs, the neighborhoods themselves take miles to navigate and then you have to get to a main thoroughfare or possibly even a freeway to then commute 10+ miles to work or to get groceries or see a movie or whatever you might want to do. Try riding a bike 15 miles with 2 kids in tow while picking up groceries on the way back home from some after-school activity or sport. It's just not feasible.
> It's quite easy to ride a bike around the suburbs and kids in particular do it all the time.
First, I don't agree. Most of the suburbs I've lived in or near have extremely low bicycle traffic, even though kids do it sometimes.
But more importantly, where are those kids going? Usually either nowhere, or to another suburban house. They're probably not getting groceries or otherwise leaving the residential area.
busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient bus lines connecting to major train/tram/metro lines. Randstad is one big metropolis without a coherent public transportation planning.
I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was backwards to be honest. public transportation became more expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use it..
my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1 connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins, so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go figure.
Yes prices are problematic. The above mentioned 20 kilometers to work is a 5 euro bus ticket. A bus full of people should not cost 25 cents per kilometer per person. It's slightly cheaper than my car but it should be a lot cheaper because so many people share one vehicle.
Let's assume a driver's salary of 18 €/h. A rule of thumb I've heard is that vacation, sick days, social security etc. etc. approximately double that cost to the company, so 36 €/h. 20 kph average speed is already a somewhat generous value for a regular non-BRT city bus line, but let's use it for simplicity's sake, which gives 1,80 €/km driver's costs.
Another rough value of thumb for city buses is that they use roughly about 30 l/100 km, which adds about 0,50 €/km, so 2,30 €/km for driver + fuel.
A regular city bus holds about 100 passengers, and an average utilisation figure as averaged across the whole day and all routes might be somewhere around 20 %. So an average of 20 passengers per bus at all times, which means 11.5 cents per kilometre for driver and fuel. Now add-in capital cost for the bus itself, maintenance and other ancillary stuff and unfortunately 25 cents per kilometre isn't all that much all of a sudden.
(If you can read some German, somebody did a more complete modelling of costs at https://prof.bht-berlin.de/fileadmin/prof/jschlaich/200811_F..., and with some assumed fictitious but presumably plausible values ended up at 3,26 €/vehicle-km for a city bus operation in 2008 – and both (driver) pay and fuel have increased above inflation since then.)
> Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work.
Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm sure.
> They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am again stuck with these days).
>Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
Friday and Saturday public transit should at least run pretty late, unless you want people who don't want to pay for taxis driving home after drinking and partying.
Tangentially, this line of thinking has become very commonplace in the US.
People will wait in drive-thru lines that take twice as long as parking and walking in for coffee, food and even school/daycare/camp dropoff/pickup. It's baffling to me but, on the upside, I'll gladly pick up their slack and be in/out twice as fast.
Public transportation is not wide spread or serious but even in the places where it is an option (NE corridor), people often rather spend an extra 20/40/60 mins in a vehicle (theirs or a rideshare service) than use public transportation.
In an individualistic country like The Netherlands people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making.
Nobody is trading a 20 minute drive for a 60 minute bus trip in order to create a better neighbourhood. Get that bus trip down to at most 30 minutes and people might reconsider.
> people will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making
Or remove/penalise the more convenient (but harmful) alternatives. We shouldn’t kid ourselves, we’re going to need sticks as well as carrots if we want to avoid disaster
You may be listening to the media a bit too much. The concept of 'climate' is increasingly used in a similar way as 'social justice' in some political discussions – as a broad idea to justify various authoritarian policies.
The government deciding how to use tax money is not authoritarian. Making people and companies responsible for eating the cost of automobiles isn't authoritarian either, if anything I'd say it's the opposite.
A big part of the reason why automobiles are so successful is that the cost are externalized. If oil companies and automobile manufacturers were forced to pay the cost of climate degradation they'd starve. But they're essentially on a type of welfare - where the people, and gov, eat those costs instead.
If we're playing welfare anyway, we might as well use it for public transit. And, as an aside, climate change is a real thing. It's not even up for debate. And yes, in order to solve a problem, you need policies. The "try nothing and hope it works" approach has been our approach forever and surprise! It doesn't work.
People do eat the cost of automobiles, what are you talking about? There is a federal gas tax, there are toll roads, there are property taxes, there are license and registration fees, there are even speeding fines, parking fines, etc etc. Cars also have an extremely positive impact on economic activity. They've enriched the lives of people, empower them to live in more affordable locations with higher standards of living, get access to goods shipped in from outside the state and outside the country at cheap prices, get access to overnight delivery on any food, product, or service, access to alternative schooling, medical care, ambulance services, fire rescue, police coverage, etc. etc.
The climate has not degraded, it has warmed slightly. It is not even as hot today as it was in the early Holocene. The earth has actually greened from the CO2 fertilization affect, increasing the leaf area index on one quarter to one half of earth's surface over the past 35 years (https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...).
There are far less deaths from natural disasters today than there was 100 years ago (in large part thanks to automobiles enabling people to evacuate and emergency responders to be activated).
Welfare is paid for by the same tax payers that are paying for gas tax, property tax, income taxes, etc. By no means should they be forced into some ideologue's vision for how "a perfect society" should work.
Yes exactly. People, you and me, eat the cost of automobiles. NOT the automobile manufacturers or the oil industry. We take most of the cost, they've externalized it to us, i.e. they are on welfare. Just in a roundabout way.
If you put those costs on them instead of us, they would be in very hot water. And they may be motivated to change their business practices.
And I won't comment on the urgency or scale of the global climate. It's not worth an argument.
> You need to give them a better alternative if you want to influence their decision making.
Exactly! Offering compelling alternatives is the only way to change behavior in a way that's a win-win for both you and the people who prefer the option you don't.
I don’t actually think urbanism is antithetical to convenience, it’s just another form of achieving convenience by having more amenities close by (“15 minute cities”). I personally live in NYC despite being fully remote, because of how accessible literally everything is, it’s instant gratification paradise.
Extremist approach will never win any popularity and sway masses in such direction, so if you want to position some push for greener cities from extremist or even eco-terrorism perspective (so popular among young in western Europe these days), good luck seeing any results that would make you happy and actually achieve anything you wish for.
World is more complex mixture of various people than just similarly-minded people. Number of examples in the past where people feeling righteous and above the rest imposed pretty harsh things on general population. Not the way we should be heading.
We have serious issues with ecosystem, but even removing 100% of the cars alone won't solve any of those (plus it won't ever happen) so let's be a bit more smart.
Didn't say bus, I meant public transit overal. Living and working in two cities of that size there should be faster public transit between them.
Either that or better city planning so you don't end up with two cities of 140k and 300k but instead have one city of 440k with better interconnects between neighbourhoods and more light rail.
They don't want to walk because cars make walking less pleasant, more difficult and more dangerous. Everywhere you look things are made slightly easier for cars and slightly harder for everyone else.
> The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge parking or city hub.
Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it’s through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good sidewalks, trees and grass?
Also, aren’t many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if there’s a parking garage under an apartment building, it likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.
I understand, but your points aren't really relevant for a number of reasons:
First, it is a dream, you have to do something to make it work. You are describing the status quo, I want us to move to something else. After decades of neoliberalism, even embraced by the centre-left party, we have eroded our actually quite decent public transport facilities. There is no reason it has to stay this way.
Second, I'm not talking about people commuting to work with public transport vs cars, even though it would be nice to get people out of the car into a much more efficient system. I'm talking about our neighbourhoods, the places where people actually live. I'm talking about going outside your house and not as a first thing having to face the noise, danger, pollution, ugliness, etc. of parked cars and cars moving on the road.
The neighbourhood could be a place where children play on the streets, where there is space to meet each other, with room for trees and other vegetation. If you just move all the tin out of the neighbourhood and to the edges on big solar covered parking lots, then it is easily done. It will create a lot of space and very little downsides. Of course we can't just rebuild all cities, but we can use this design for new ones.
I'm really not talking about parking along the edges of the city, so that you have to take a bus or bicycle in order to get to your car. I want people to park just on the edges of a block or neighbourhood (like 500 to 5000 people, depending on density). You should be able to walk to such a parking lot within 5 min. You would still be able to get to your house for things like groceries and stuff, just not park there. And disabled people would get an exception. Just this relatively simple change will reduce traffic immensely.
Third, it may feel now like you are entitled to be able to park in front of your house and drive to it by car. Everybody must naturally accommodate your wishes in this respect, because this is what the majority wants. However, if we change that and take that away from you, it will not take a lot of time before that changes. And then people will start to feel entitled to be able to have their children play on the streets again, and to enjoy such these carless spaces. In the same way, smokers used to feel entitled to be able to smoke in restaurants, in the train and even at the office. Things can and do change.
For the people who meticulously maxed out the total amount of minutes they are willing to commute, so that they really can't bear to add 2 x 5 minutes of healthy walks a day: they will eventually move jobs closer to home or vice versa, so we eventually again hit the same average of daily travel time which has been stable since medieval times. Reduced emissions is just a bonus.
Really, why are we not doing this? The Netherlands is often seen as a country which has their act together around transportation, but it could still be so much better. Cars are still way too dominant and there are way, way too many of them. We just don't have the space.
> My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar covered parking spaces.
Some individuals, particularly those with disabilities or mobility issues, may find it challenging
It's not that simple. Your car increases your freedom, but everybody else's cars decrease it. As a resident who does not have a car, cars impede my freedom to bike and jaywalk, they are unsightly and reduce visibility, they take up space that could be used for bike lanes, greenery, benches or terraces. It would be far more pleasant if there were far less of them.
I believe that Japan bans on-street parking and that you are not allowed to have a car unless you can prove that you have dedicated parking for it. That seems like a good model to me.
Are those residents paying for the total cost of that parking? The space consumed, the opportunity costs averted, the safety cost of more cars driving through dense areas with pedestrians and cyclists?
If they are then that freedom is a valid choice. If they aren't, then they're being subsidized by public amenities, and the public can decide how those amenities should be used.
Not through direct usage tax, but probably through local taxes. And cycling and pedestrian infrastructure generally costs less per person-mile of capacity than car infrastructure.
Those streets and sidewalks were created through public action, the public decided or elected people who decided that that was a good allocation of resources.
Just like we decide that parking in some places is a good allocation of resources.
Changing our minds on which thing to allocate resources to isn't an affront to our freedoms, when done in a way that is democratic or representative.
The town deciding to build a park on some land instead of selling it to a developer to build a mall isn't an oppression of the mall builder's freedoms. It's just a choice.
Personally I find having choices in how to move around is an increase in personal freedom. Needing to own, insure, maintain, and fuel a car to participate in a community is a financial burden, and a burden on those who have to deal with cars and traffic while trying to do things like walk across a giant parking lot to get between two locations that should be reasonable to walk between.
Casting all decisions that do anything to take away public infrastructure for cars as a reduction in freedom is ridiculous.
1. I see kids in public transit all the time, including kids around age 10 taking trams by themselves. It’s also common to see groups of kids out on bikes or in a park. It’s more independence, not less.
2. I’ve seen a full range of disabilities on transit as well. Plus, isn’t it better for the disabled if it’s easy for them to drive since the roads and parking are mostly free of able-bodied people?
3. If you’re in the countryside, you can still drive when you need to. You can park at the edge of a city and take quick efficient transit to whichever internal part of the city you’d like. Also, living somewhere inconvenient like the countryside is a choice, and that inconvenience should be considered when looking for a place to live
4. I travel for work and have never needed a car. If you do, see the answer above for those in the countryside, that applies too
We can all make cities better without being 100% binary. Cars can be the exception rather than the rule, though
Your dream sounds like a nightmare. I can only imagine what it would be like for the very elderly or anybody on crutches.
Cars are very convenient and rapidly developing countries more populous than any European country have been embracing them as their economies grow richer for a reason.
It's actually better. Because disabled parking is still a thing.
Also you can easily find a parking space, because it's somewhat expensive. But that means I can go downtown on a Saturday, easily find parking for a few hours, do my shit and drive home. Yes it costs 10-15usd for 2 hours of parking. But that's a small price to pay.
Reducing everyone's ability to drive greatly increases the people who actually need to drives ability to do so.
The comment I replied to included, "also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car traffic". Read my sibling comment and the issues should be very clear.
The part you quoted doesn't say cars are banned... Banning roadside parking in neighborhoods is already done in many places pretty commonly and it's fine. "Most car traffic" is vague but implies that those in need would still have their cars.
Ah yes, the _very elderly or anybody on crutches_... the people who have more to gain from using good public transportation than having to drive a two tons vehicle on streets filled with living kids.
Seven of my eight great grandparents were still alive while I was in high school and two of them lived with us. We didn't make them drive. We drove them to restaurants, church events, doctors, etc.
When I drove my great grandmother to a restaurant as a teenager in Colorado, I'd park right by the restaurant in a handicapped spot, grab her walker from the back seat and help her hobble into her favorite restaurant. It was a meaningful part of her week in later years.
There's absolutely no way it would have been feasible on public transit, even if we'd had the world-class 2024 Taipei Metro I regularly use now.
When I lived in Tokyo and in Japan in general I saw old people walk all the time. In fact the irony is, they are the ones that need to walk most. Physical inactivity accelerates senescence. Only young people can get away with not walking.
Of course there's extremely ill people and when it comes to transport policies there's always exceptions for that kind of commute, but the approach to elderly mobility right now is completely backwards. We should be encouraging modes of transport that keeps the elderly moving and autonomous.
I live in a neighborhood with a fair share of 50+ adults, and there are no sidewalks leaving the neighborhood, and few in the area. I could walk to the grocery store, I could walk to a convenience store, but I can't do so safely.
I'd be thrilled if we started making sidewalks a reality.
Unfortunately mayors of cities in the Netherlands do not have sufficient power to change rules like these, its the state which makes these rules. This is why we won't see such a thing in my country. There are progressive cities where it could fly, but overall the Netherlands has become extremely conservative.