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by MrBuddyCasino
765 days ago
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You are right, I suspect this triggered an allergic reaction to an adjacent topic, the "walkable cities" meme. Sounds innocent enough, the reality is that if you try to ban cars from cities (and there are nuances and trade-offs here), you a) create a dependency on public transport, which you can then be denied eg during Covid b) remove the basis of what makes business and having a family possible essentially turning your city into an open-air museum, to be looked at by tourists (it is worth looking at). |
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a) Roads can be closed just as easily during a pandemic, attempted coup or major government crisis. Dependency on roads necessitates a car - an enormously greater barrier of entry than the price of a subway, tram or bus ticket. Fewer citizens using public transport leads to a death spiral in which public transit is continually underinvested, becomes more expensive to build and maintain and eventually ghettoised into a small number of prestige projects and a much larger number of decaying and even dangerous services, serving only the poorest and most socially excluded citizens - as has happened in so many US citizens. The reverse is observably true in cities built around vibrant public transport networks - Berlin, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Singapore, Utrecht etc. These cities aren't constructed around one key piece of crumbling infrastructure (like the NYC subway), but coherent and growing networks of trains, buses, trams etc.
Reliance on a car also makes you much more vulnerable to economic shocks - be they rising oil prices or personal issues that deprive you of the ability to drive (accidents, health problems, criminal convictions etc). Your mobility within the city becomes locked to a large capital investment which can be taken away in numerous ways.
b) Clearly car free or low car cities - like the ones listed above - worldwide have thriving businesses and families. To suggest otherwise is simply orthogonal to reality. They're highly desired places to live. Perhaps you're conflating the US suburb's with 'business and having a family'? A city littered with playgrounds, safe walkable pavements and on street businesses (like say Berlin), offers a far safer environment for young children than a series of shopping districts separated by dangerous unpassable roads, or low density suburban mass housing served by Wallmart style megastores - lacking cultural facilities, access to exercise or community amenities (many small US cities and also most small to medium sized Irish towns, like the one in which I was unfortunate enough to grow up).
'Walkable cities' are literally just places where the city is constructed around the social, economic and environmental needs of its citizenry rather than anachronistic modernist utopian ideas of vast highways and infinities of commuters streaming into colossal towers.