Slashdot Mirror
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.
here is another alternative http://www.arcosanti.org/ Arcosanti designed by the world famous artchitect - Paolo Soleri - actaully exists :)
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
... have you?
I remember the first time my dad took me there. I was 11 or 12 years old. It was falling apart faster than they were building it. It was an interesting walk albeit risky due to the delapidated nature and lack of any kind of safety barriers. This was roughly 23 years ago.
All these years later not much has changed. The web site makes it look a lot nicer than it really is.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I did this in the original Sim City. No roads AT ALL, and it worked. My main incentive was not to get rid of the roads, it was to get rid of that annoying traffic helicopter and the "Skywatch One reporting heavy traffic" that went off every 30 seconds. It had a really extensive rail network. I think I still have that savegame around somewhere...
I don't think simulating cities is actually as easy as it sounds. It was only a few years ago that we reached the capability to simulate traffic in cities over a day or so. The actual growth of a city over years could take some big doing, or dumbing down of the simulation detail.
Here's the info on the traffic sim:
Los Alamos gains corporate partner for traffic simulation
Incidently, here's an interesting if not mildly amusing 'amatuer' traffic analysis:
Traffic Waves
And a more thorough site on better driving (which is actually pretty sweet- this should be required reading for drivers):
Big City Driver
Happy trails,
Jason
You can build over the roads, at least. Something like Seattle's Monorail, except hopefully a lot less lame.
In some cases you can build under roads, too.
Boston does have its own car problems, though. Some people move into neighborhoods like the Back Bay and Beacon Hill and still feel the need to own a car. I try not to drive down Newbury Street since I mostly take the T, but whenever I do I'm amazed at the number of Trailblazers and BMW SUVs and high-priced cars. What with everything you need within a block or two, why would one need a car in Boston?
For those who need to drive on occasion, Zipcar offers its services in the Boston area. Much easier and cheaper than trying to own one in town. I'm surprised it hasn't caught on more than it has. It seems so much easier to rent a car by the hour for things like grocery shopping and moving! But it will take time to convince people that owning a car in Boston is simply not worth the hassle, time, and money...
www.tealeaves.org "All you need is love." -
Hm? The subways in New York go basically everywhere in Manhattan, with decent coverage in Brooklyn and the Bronx, and even in Queens they cover more than you'd get in any other city.
There are express and local trains so you can bypass stops that aren't of interest.
I doubt there's anything in the real world that works better (and I've used pretty much all of the world's major subways, from London to Calcutta).
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
True, however it's important to note that the London Underground started with simply putting trains (regular huge trains with steam locomotives) underground. The main reason for this was the fumes and soot caused by the steam locomotives, and also the fact that there were so many lines coming into the city, they needed to go somewhere, and underground was the best place to put them. It did not start off as an urban transit line or a subway system.
That's why the Underground travels all over the London metro area--in fact, the Underground helped develop a number of London suburbs!
The concept of mass transit creating suburbs is not unique to London. The concept of a "streetcar suburb" is known in nearly every large U.S. city, and others around the world. (It's important to note that the word "suburb" became corrupted somewhere along the line. With the advent of Levittown and the postwar boom, "suburb" became synonymous with "suburbia" - the land of tract housing, large yards, a car in every driveway, and the split-level ranch. That is not, however, what it meant at the turn of the century)
Streetcar companies would buy cheap land at what was then the city limits, built streetcar (or elevated) lines out to the land, parcel it up, and sell it off. Many families bought it, since it was away from the noise of the city, they could have a small yard and such, and yet getting to the city was still easy. The land sales paid for the initial investment of the line, and made a tidy profit for the companies, too.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
I built all my cities in the original Sim City like that. It was more expensive at first, but the lack of traffic and pollution more than made up for it later in the game.
Later versions of SC eliminated that loophole. You had to have roads, period.
In the real world, it also takes insurance, traffic police, highway patrols, traffic courts, road cleaning, snow removal, over- and under-passes, gas stations, refineries, planning offices, car junkyards, emergency roadside assistance, fast-responding emergency medical services, helicopters, traffic surveillance, traffic computers,and on and on. Many of those costs are much lower or non-existent for public transportation, and you do pay for them, through taxes, fees, association memberships, auto and medical insurance, etc., expenses you may not associate with cars but expenses that are nevertheless very real.
And those are only direct, easily quantifiable costs. When you add in costs for maintaining a presence in the Persian Gulf, for respiratory diseases caused by pollution, for lost productivity due to traffic jams, for ecological damage from paving over large parts of the country, and other such effects, the costs are even worse.
As an exercise, just total up what you pay in terms of gas, insurance, license fees, interest, amortized purchase price, amortized disposal fees, and other car related expenses per year. I think you'll be surprised how expensive driving it, and that only accounts for a fraction of the costs mentioned above.
Oh, by the way, I don't know whether you are in good shape or not, but if you drive less, chances are you would also be in better shape than you are now (and save on medical bills, too).
What kind of power poles are you talking about? If you're talking about the standard, usually wood, utility poles, then those are rapidly becoming extinct as utilites are being undergrounded. If you're talking about the real big - 50-100 ft tall poles, then those aren't going away anytime soon. The big reason they're so high up, and why they can't be undergrounded very easy, is because of the heat they generate as a byproduct of power transmission. Studies have been done on this, and there's no real way of getting rid of them, only moving them to the least intrusive area possible.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Yes Venice is car free but it isn't gas based vehicle free and so it as the marine equivalent of the car problem. Venice has a big problem with gas powered boats and so it only have the same problem in a different form.
If I remember correctly, a lot of this is because of bone head voters. For instance, the BART has had trouble getting extended down the penninsula through San Mateo to San Jose because voters in every little town along the way (Burlingame, San Mateo, Belmot, Palo Alto), etc. have to approve it. And in each town, there's some people who claim that by having a BART station in their town, it'll allow bums and degenerates from other areas easy access to their area and lower property values. So part of the reason has to fall back on the voters.
Funny you should say that.... In fact, I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where it can be below freezing for weeks, and I do ride my bike to work daily in that weather. It's not that big a deal. People ski in that weather for fun, right? A little exercise warms you up a lot--dress to be a little cold when you leave the house, and in a few minutes you'll be unzipping your jacket....
And people bike commute in much colder weather than I have to; the Icebike web site has some good stories and advice.
I admit to being glad to see the spring when it comes, but winter biking can be fun in its own way.
--Bruce Fields
You can fix it all by changing the urban planning strategy. I live in Vancouver, and you can see the success of our program. The region is bounded by an Agricultural Land Reserve, and can't grow outwards - so it can only grow by increasing density. This is achieved by "infill" - taking existing low-density lots, and filling in the gaps to increase density. The first target is the surface parking lot, followed by empty malls, brownfield industrial sites, and even upping zoning densities when lots are redeveloped.
Small steps count. Since amalgamating into a larger megacity, Toronto has forced the suburbs to build sidewalks and bikelanes, and is slowly improving the livability of the outlying regions. Vancouver's downtown is a model of urban high-density redevelopment, as the abandoned portlands and waterfront industrial sites were rebuilt into highly livable condominium towers.
So don't give up hope - lobby your municipality for better urban planning, and push out the highway engineers!
- David