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Creating Car Free Cities
Silas writes "CarFree.com is a great site that "proposes a delightful solution to the vexing problem of urban automobiles." The site presents a fascinating, detailed proposal for a major city (1 million people in 100 square miles) that doesn't require the use of cars. This isn't a new concept; a lot of the ideas are modeled off of major car free cities in Europe (like Venice)." The page on Morocco is fascinating.
Cars represent individualism. I can hop in my car and drive pretty much wherever I want, whenever I want. It offers me great individual mobility. Much moreso than the ever-so-overhyped Segway(tm).
Leftists hate individualism. They think people should be represented by their group, not by their own selves. They think people should be dependent on the government, not dependent on themselves. Individualism stands in the way of their big truth that all humans must embrace (or go to the gulag, as it always turns out in practice).
Hence, Leftists hate cars.
Not that I like cars, myself. I would actually prefer to see American cities (particularly my own hometown of Atlanta where it is impossible to live sans auto and thus suffers from the worst, most redneck-engineered traffic jams in the country) become more pedestrian friendly. But I'm not so blind as to understand why so many Star-Trek-worshipping pan-socialist latch-onto-the-government-teat know-it-all college-student crybabies would like to ban the automobile.
Oh, and the "it harms the environment" argument. To you, I say your God is Gaea, and I think your religion, like all religions, is superstitious garbage.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
you only sit in traffic because you are unwilling to look for alternate paths. You and the rest of the cows go to the nearest freeway just like everyone else. Take a side road for christ sake
Yeah, right.
Instead of a pack of fuck tards menacing the streets with their lack of driving skills; let's have a bunch of fuck tards in much larger vehicles creating much larger menace on our streets.
now go fuckyourself. thnaks.
Sounds like you may be a bit jealous we don't burn 1,000 gallons of gas in heating every year.
I don't see what the big deal is, really. I live, work, and study car-free in Houston, TX, a city not known for its public transportation or agreeable climate. 10 min bike ride to work, 15 min bike ride to school. To compare, the average travel time by car, door to door, including parking, stop-lights, traffic, etc, is 9 minutes to work and 15 minutes to school. I'd rather get a nice work-out and enjoy some nature (the path I use runs along a bayou). 5/8 people who work in my lab live within 2 miles of the building. The convenience lifestyle is boring and over-rated. Anyone who sits for an hour a day in traffic has serious priority problems. Every freeway in this city flows in inches per second for six hours a day. Has anyone studied the physical and psychological price of sitting alone in a hermetically sealed box for X hours a day? People who need 2000sq. ft.+ house in a lifeless suburb should probably rethink their concepts of housing. I like to think of the bus as an adventure. Light rail is a nice, fancy decoration of political motivations but ultimately useless unless it's intra & inter-urban and extensive. Cars are unreliable, ugly, and expensive. Sorry to be didactic, but these are fundamental truths. The commuter city is irrevocably flawed and must be rebuilt.