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Starting in 2019, Oslo Will Restrict the Use of Vehicles in its City Center (nytimes.com)
If you drive a car into the city center of Oslo next month, you shouldn't plan on staying long: There won't be any parking spots. The Norwegian capital is in the process of eliminating the remaining 700 street parking spots in its city center by the end of 2018 as part of its plan to turn the area into a car-free zone. From a report: "We're doing this to give the streets back to the people," Hanna Elise Marcussen, Oslo's vice mayor for urban development, said during a recent phone interview. "And of course, it's environmentally friendly." (The Scandinavian country, recently recognized as one of the world's most ecologically progressive nations, has plans to become carbon neutral by 2030 and halt the sale of fossil fuel cars by 2025.)
[...] In Oslo, the plan to remove cars from the city began in 2015 when a coalition of progressive political parties called for a city center free from vehicles. Similar plans have been met with resistance in places like Dublin, where local officials have proposed expanding that city's pedestrian zone, and Barcelona. Even in ecologically minded Oslo, it wasn't easy. "There's been quite a bit of public date, and there's been quite a lot of controversy, and it's been quite difficult to do this in a way that businesses and citizens can accept," Ms. Marcussen said.
[...] In Oslo, the plan to remove cars from the city began in 2015 when a coalition of progressive political parties called for a city center free from vehicles. Similar plans have been met with resistance in places like Dublin, where local officials have proposed expanding that city's pedestrian zone, and Barcelona. Even in ecologically minded Oslo, it wasn't easy. "There's been quite a bit of public date, and there's been quite a lot of controversy, and it's been quite difficult to do this in a way that businesses and citizens can accept," Ms. Marcussen said.
Less cars where people are walking all the time??? Holy shit!!! Bourbon street does this all the time though
Not allowing vehicles is not the answer.
Norway is a socialist mess, and stuff like this is WHY it's a mess.
$1000 says that politicians will be granted an exemption and thus be able to use vehicles where other people are not permitted to do so.
Stop pumping oil and gas out of the North Sea.
Because they are paying for their environmentally friendly nation by selling fossil fuels to other countries.
How will goods be brought into the city without the use of vehicles? Will they use pack mules? It sounds like a good idea, but all the businesses which provide jobs will have no way to bring in food, and retail merchandise.
I can't wait for autonomous vehicles. Get out of your car and just have it circle the block for an hour or so until you are ready to go.
Have gnu, will travel.
I’m not a Republican. It is a legitimate question. If they block off the roads to automobiles but allow trucks that seems like it would still make the roads dangerous for bicycles and it would still need to be kept for vehicles. I can’t RTFA because it’s paywalled and I can’t find any other article that explains how they will handle it. A city center with no restaurants or shops sounds awful.
Great advice. Of course that doesn't change anything about this decision in Oslo, why are you bringing it up except as a whattabout-distraction? I don't see how this is a threat to Putin or his local affiliate, why the red herring?
Firstly you can untwist your panties because there is no way Norway will stop selling oil, especially while it is being ruled by a bunch of right wing parties. Secondly, WTF does Putin have to do with any of this?
As much as it might kind of stink day to day for the people that live there, I can see a number of very popular tourist cities forgoing parking.
That way you can handle a lot more tourists walking around a larger area - better for shops, and even better for tourists until the sheer mass of extra tourist this allows for starts to clog up things like all the good restaurants... but then more will open up if there are people enough to support them.
I think it will be pretty interesting to see how this goes, Oslo was a very nice place and I had wanted to return there someday anyway as my visit there was all too brief. If you do go the Viking museum is nice, but I honestly liked the Fram museum even more for the more technological angle and spirit of exploration. Awesome ship.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How will autonomous cars work in that case? How do you build a society around the idea that our cars are idle if they're all idle at (roughly) the same time?
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Exactly.
It is about restricting the rights of private citizens, and forcing them to use commercial transport instead of what they already have.
A great boost for Taxi services.
Isnt it wonderful when the 'socialists' boost corporate welfare through regulatory capture in the name of the people and environment.. score one for the workers!
I bet the goods delivery parks, taxi stands, and private commercial carparks are not being removed...
Those middle class who bother to own a car, and paid for the roads truly are suckers.
We’be been doing that for forty years in the Netherlands and finally other countries see the light.
-- Cheers!
I took a ferry to the Fram, pretty sure that was free - if you are getting rid of parking that probably does mean free shuttles around the city and to parking on the outskirts. Even if not though, it would still be cheaper than parking in most cities...
As for the disabled person, maybe they will still be able to park with a valid handicapped tag - or maybe they will just have to rely on special accommodations.
But It's not like the city center of Oslo has much besides tourist shops anyway. If they are going to see a doctor it's very probably not in the zone under consideration - and the city will be easier to drive through to reach an appointment as a result.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How do you build a society around the idea that our cars are idle if they're all idle at (roughly) the same time?
Autonomous carpooling. Take it one step further and you end up with autonomous fixed route bus service.
Because they are paying for their environmentally friendly nation by selling fossil fuels to other countries.
So? What would your prefer they spend their fossil fuel money on?
for a pickup. Also one of the major things that makes buses suck is all the stops. That's what takes a 30 minute drive and turns it into 90 minutes.
Don't get me wrong, I really, really want a world where I don't have to own a car. I hate the damn things. I'm just not sure if this'll work.
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Think of a redesigned city with similar high rise buildings ie retail on the first few floors and then commercial on the next bunch of floors and then capped off be residential. So often you don't even need to leave your building and often what you need is in the building across the street and you are free to walk there. This does not support suburbia in the least because of the distributed source of the traffic, prevents better public transport options, until further development in tunnelling allows an automated system of human transport right to your home.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
No it's the stunning level of hypocrisy when a country seeks to eliminate car traffic stating that it helps the environment but then turns around and funds the entire government by fossil fuel production. A true environmental supporter would demand their country divests from any industry that produces fossil fuels. They would stop using a personal car for any travel. They would buy only products manufactured in their country to cut down on the damage created by using fossil fuel powered oceanic shipping and air delivery conduits. Everybody bitches about the environment but never put forth a reasonable course of action to improve the environment. And it is going to take more than protesting and signing worthless treaties. And oil is used not only in the transportation sector but also in the textile sector. Fossil fuel powered vehicles are not going away. They could outlaw the production of fossil fuel vehicles tomorrow but the existing personal and domestic vehicle fleets will still be around 50 years from now. Any alternative energy alternatives would need a new delivery infrastructure that will run parallel with the existing fossil fuel delivery infrastructure.
Most European cities have a street or a whole district which is already like this. Severely limited to cars, but delivery trucks can visit when needed (generally very early in the morning). These are usually the most popular and touristy streets in the cities, with lots of restaurants and shopping and bars on the ground floor, and apartments in the 3-6 stories above the shops. Not many delivery trucks are needed for a store, and if they drive carefully at 5mph down the street they are not much of a danger when they do arrive.
I think some of the logic of the anti-car urban factions in urban areas with poor public transit is:
1: Make driving a car difficult through reduced parking, more expensive parking, and street closures which worsen auto traffic
2: This forces drivers onto public transit.
3: The low quality public transit as the only alternative creates political pressure for better transit
It's a risky gambit, because public transit can't be made superior overnight. Really good subways and trains are the result of either legacy dumb luck from 100 years ago or once-in-a-millennium rebuilding due to war or other catastrophe. Games played with road networks to restrict cars can wind up hurting buses, which are the cheapest and fastest way to improve public transit since they require almost no fixed infrastructure.
If the larger region surrounding the car-restricted urban area is car dependent (which is nearly all of the US), the odds of a huge financial windfall to improve transit are pretty low -- people won't want to pay for massive transit upgrades.
Rather than trying to create these car-free utopias, maybe there's some better solution -- like very large parking areas on the city outskirts, combined with really fast and high quality "last mile" trams or express buses that take people to their final destination. Park and ride lots are kind of like this, but they're almost always located way out in the suburbs and aren't useful outside of explicit commuting.
and besides, this is norway. don't people ski and snowshoe to work 9 months out of the year?
You mean global warming has gotten that worse that now the time of the year when people are snowed in and can't even leave their homes has shrunken to 3 months only ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Driving is not a right, driving is a privilege"
bullshit propaganda. fuck the government and fuck you. justice is coming for these socialist scum that think every human activity needs to have a license.
Figures are rounded off. Current price of gasoline in Paris is 1.50 Euro per liter. So 3.8 liters in a gallon. 3.8 * 1.50 = 5.7 Euros per gallon. So 5.7 Euros = 6.50 USD . Is gas in SF really 6.50/gal? Seems too pricey -- even for SF. Let's check.....GIYF -- SF has the highest gas prices in the US at $3.80 per gallon. $6.50 -$3.80 = $2.70. So Paris is $2.70 more expensive than SF. I leave it to you to check diesel prices.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
A lot of us drive EVs. About 50% of new cars sold are EVs.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The problem is that Oslo is:
1. Central administration of Norway, bringing a lot of jobs, boolstering its size and economy
2. A small county in size, meaning there is limited place
3. Various centralization policies have lead to every single national company setting up HQ in Oslo, again making its economy bigger. This has been going on since the railroad and phone lines where properly expanded.
4. Oslo has retained its original "city borders".
So if you combine this, and get cynical you could argue Oslo stretches between Råholt, Skarnes, Askin, Halden, Moss, Tønsberg, Drammen and Hønefoss.
This is a area of 7 022,33 km^2 while Oslo county/city/fylke is 480.76 km^2.
The problem is that Oslo builds infrastructure insides its border, while feeding jobs and commuting to a area thats 15 times larger. In European or American or Asian measurements this is not a big area, with a lot of residents. But the denial of what Oslo is and its infrastructure is leading to some severe congestion that needs to be solved somehow.
Oslo banning cars is not going to fix this. Railroads, commute stations in other counties and buss networks are not built out to a level where the congestion can solve itself. Oslo county is not cooperating with its surrounding counties to solve long term infrastructure problems or decentralize the economy enough to stop everyone from setting up HQ in Oslo for historical reasons.
Banning cars will essentially "delay" the problem for as long as it takes to fill up the new free real estate, and maybe it gets a little better as walking/biking is somewhat effective to increase population density.
But the issue will remain as long as people setup HQ in Oslo or corporation, and then their workers need to commute from a nearby county without the infrastructure to just painless go there.
It's a risky gambit, because public transit can't be made superior overnight
Public transit can be made significantly better immediately, by making buses frequent rather than infrequent. Once that is done, it can be made significantly better once again by painting bus-only lanes on the street - which makes buses faster and cars possibly slower, leading to more bus ridership, a virtuous cycle. It works great if you can get the political willpower to take away a car lane.
Really good subways and trains are the result of either legacy dumb luck from 100 years ago or once-in-a-millennium rebuilding due to war or other catastrophe.
All it takes is a steady building program over a couple decades. NYC's subway was almost entirely build between 1900 and 1930, almost none has been built since then. Shanghai's subway, which carries nearly twice as many people as NYC's, was build between 1997 and 2018 (it is still rapidly expanding). Madrid has the second largest subway in Europe, about half of it was built between 1998-2007. None of these cities had rebuilding due to catastrophes. They just had the political willpower to invest in this. (Arguably, they also had political systems that were less dysfunctional than the US is in 2018.)
Don't forget the commuting enables labor mobility which is a massive boost to economic productivity. It'd be great if there was no commuting but you either need to have reduced labor mobility (ie, keeping less productive people in jobs) or greatly increased housing liquidity so people can move if they change jobs.
You can make buses more efficient without even increasing the number of buses by simply restricting where they will stop, say every 5 blocks vs. every block. This forces an extra 2 block walk, max, for every commuter.
Increasing buses definitely helps, but it's also expensive in terms of capital investment and fuel consumption.
Building subways was significantly easier 1900-1930 as they could use more intrusive construction like trench excavation and labor costs were a lot lower, in addition to lower costs for land acquisition.
Shanghai is an outlier because its subway was a byproduct of both crazy Chinese construction growth and a political system where there was not really room for opposition. I don't know the details of Madrid's expansion, but I suspect that it had a lot to do with cheap foreign loans that affected the Spanish economy and probably a long-term deficit in infrastructure development, which contributed to the political will.
I just don't see any of those factors leading to a massive subway system being built in the US anytime soon.