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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.
Stop pumping oil and gas out of the North Sea.
As a Norwegian: do you mind explaining why our country is a mess? Most people here seem quite satisfied, please explain why we shouldn't be.
How will goods be brought into the city without the use of vehicles?
Try reading. The trucks will have an easier time making deliveries with fewer cars choking the roads.
Anyone who has driven in central Oslo will know this is an experience not to be missed. Nobody will ever miss it.
Since the billion-dollar Bjørvika tunnel opened in 2010, there is not much reason to even drive through Oslo.
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
The only concrete fact is that they are eliminating street parking. There are still plenty of multi-storey P-hus .
There is a vague "plan to turn the area into a car-free zone" one day. Not a ban of all vehicles.
We’be been doing that for forty years in the Netherlands and finally other countries see the light.
-- Cheers!
No, it doesn't. Read it again.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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?
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
Actually it enhances the rights of private citizens. Just because you have a car doesn't mean I should have to give up my right to walk on the road. We all have legs. Only some have cars.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Hopefully Oslo is different. In the US, a city doing this will wind up just like Austin, SF, and NYC. The Maybach drivers will have parking somewhere. The workers who don't make the 6-7 digits a year will have to deal with a shitty commute, crappy public transportation, and delays, while the city leaders can thump their chests about how "eco" they are.
Take Austin. The city council is doing their damndest to force cars out of the city core, by allowing businesses to build high density residential towers with zero parking on residential roads that never were meant for thousands of vehicles an hour. However, the council is proud of the fact that they have not made a single improvement to the highways in the city since 1995, other than the state of Texas adding tollways. If you are wealthy enough to take Uber everywhere, and pay $10-$30 so you can take the HOV lane downtown and back, it is great. If you don't... well, you deal with $45/day garage fees, or try to use Capital Metro, which also functions as a bedroom (and bathroom) for the local crusties.
Having environmental laws apply evenly is one thing. Trying to appear environmentally conscious by screwing the working class is another, and this is why we are seeing the French "Yellow Vest" protesters. The ironic thing is that in California, gas and diesel costs more there than it does in France, even comparing gallon per gallon and dollar for Euro.
I know someone who lost his legs. Yes he did save up and buy a pair and watching him walk, you'd never guess that he has artificial legs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
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.
Not everyone goes to work at *exactly* the same time. If the average autonomous car drives just two people to work each day, one at 7am and one at 8am, then you've eliminated half the cars that a city needs for commuting. Naturally, autonomous cars outside the peak hour (like an hour before or after the peak) would be much cheaper (since the marginal cost of another ride is low) which would provide a strong incentive for workers to spread out their commuting times a bit.
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.