[self_awareness]

Price per meter when buying a flat was #1.

#2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.

#3 is that it's a tourist city; a good place to visit, pay money and go home. Not a good place for me to live every day (I've lived there for 15 years, and if you're a happy citizen then good for you). Most of the people here are not from Cracow itself. Warsaw suffers from the same problem.

[fpoling]

I was conducting 4 years ago a polling survey for a political party in Oslo nocking on doors and asking people opinion of recent or planned changes in the city. I was surprised how many car owners supported bans on parking on the streets and making bicycle lines instead. It decreased traffic jams.

Basically, people started to park in big parking garages with good connections to main roads. Surely it required more time to walk. But then one spends much less time finding a place to park. And traffic from/to small roads were a significant contribution to jams.

[fakedang]

It's funny seeing the behavioral differences in communally oriented societies vs idiosyncratic societies. This kind of proposal would never work in USA or India, but I could see it work in Japan and Korea.

[systemtest]

Introducing car free zones before public transit is good enough to replace cars is such a strange move.

A friend of mine lives in a car free zone but public transit stops at 23:00. He is just supposed to stay inside his home at night I guess. No parties for him.

[Rinzler89]

That's what taxis/ubers are for. It's not economically viable in every City to have public transport running empty all night just for a few people who like to party yet live far away from the party scene.

[systemtest]

It's not really economically viable to take a taxi to your night-shift warehouse job. That is around 70% of your daily wage going towards transportation.

[Rinzler89]

How many people are doing nightshifts as part of the total employed population who mostly do day shifts?

Unfortunately the same economies of scale apply to them as well. You can't have city wide public transport run 24/7 because a very small amount of the workforce works during the night.

And night shifts tend to be set in order to overlap with public transport schedules (10pm-6am) so that's not such a big problem.

[systemtest]

I took a bus at 03:00 in the night from Santa Monica Beach to Hollywood. During a week day.

If it is possible in the US of all places, it should be possible in The Netherlands.

[Rinzler89]

Technically everything is possible, you can even fly people to commute to the space station, the questions is why some places consider night routes to be economically viable and some not, but that doesn't change the fact that public transportation night routes are a loss maker for the company.

I guess it depends on how much the local government is willing to subsidize public transport, since otherwise daily price tickets will have to go up for all travelers to subsidize the few night travelers.

Here in Austria we also don't have night routes during the week in cities that are not Vienna even if some people still need to travel during the night, but the transport companies can't run at a loss, so it's either the state pays for it(via higher taxes for everyone) or the day travelers will pay more for it, there's no free lunch here, someone still needs to pay for the unprofitable night service which is a loss maker. How Santa Monia does it I don't know but it doesn't change the fact the night services are loss makers everywhere and public transportation in general is only profitable at massive scale often relying on public subsidies to stay afloat even in the US.

Also public transportation costs are not apples to apples comparable between countries. Maybe it works in the Santa Monica, since fuel is dirt cheap or maybe they subsidize a lot and maybe they can pay bus drivers peanuts or something I don't know, but here in Austria running public transport is very expensive (unions, pensions, strict work hours, great workers benefits, infrastructure, maintenance, running costs, etc), especially in cities other than Vienna, so the routes are pretty shit and night routes non existent in order to not loose money, so most people rely on private cars or taxis for commutes out of hours. Improving that would come at increased costs and ticket prices are already maxed out and so are taxes.

[ktosobcy]

> #2 was hostility to private car transport (neglection of road infrastructure, introduction of car-free zones will surely happen soon). Traffic jams are the default state of things, and it's a waste of life.

So you want more cars and at the same you moan about traffic? o_O

If you claim that traffic jams are was of life then even more you should be anti-cars...

[self_awareness]

If you want to book a visit through NFZ and you can't, because there are too many people wanting in queue, do you want to eliminate people so the queues are smaller? No? But why? You should be anti-people so that the queues are smaller!

[lifestyleguru]

Polish society mentally is at the stage where car is the status symbol and part of their identity. Amplified by the fact that they're historically unable to construct their own car. Nobody is giving up their Mercedes/Volvo/BMW/Audi in a lease 1k EUR per month to walk around or drive bicycle around the city. Especially that employment regulations promote taking a lease for a car and having company's car is the ultimate benefit. Plus the obnoxious trend of huge SUVs and American-style pickups. People move out to the outskirts, buy more cars and bigger cars and then... they commute daily to the city.

[ptsneves]

As a non pole living in Poland I think you are being unfair. The car mentality is not new, nor is it evil by itself. On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US. It is no irony that the same phenomenae has similar consequences. It is not people who are bad or stupid, on the contrary.

In Wroclaw they added hundreds of KM of bike lanes....crisscrossing normal roads. I would like to take my children by bike to their kindergarten but I dont want me or them to die.

So indeed i take my car, which i regret not being a damn fat SUV because i cannot damn stand being shaken out of my bones anymore. The roads are the German coblestone type and they are not crap because of the potholes. That is already a taken, no. The whole roads have severe long period troughs and hills that together with the pot holes make the experience a nightmare. Sprinkle that with tramlines, activated or not and I am currently considering moving out. The trams and buses work well but politicians and well meaning people often forget you need the car for things like the supermarket? I have a family of several so i cannot just take the tram or by bike for groceries. Oh my, i need a car. The sin, we are all "patola"[1] :).

And this is not just in the city proper, the surroundings' roads are awful as well. I just damaged my rim and tire driving on a normal road 40Km/h while doing this gas guzzling hobby of taking my children to a local forest.

I am a bit upset writing this because all these people in power in Europe dont have traditional families and exist in their own heaven on earth where they are independent in a very pure state. When i was 20 or if I would be a single I would get it, but with a family, please take your silly ideals elsewhere(this is for the mayor Jacek Sutryk who is unironically a bachelor).

Portugal is a bit better in that the left leaning well-doers preach but people are too real to let things get ridiculous. The talking heads sometimes fantasize about bikes everywhere but then the cities are hilly and old so it is unfeasible to add bike lanes.

[1] Patola is a derrogative name from pathological [family]. It is used to insinuate you come from a dysfunctional, often alcoholic family. Very common insult in Poland which I am fascinated about. I wonder if this insult exists in other Slavic countries.

[lifestyleguru]

I don't understand how you ended up and why would you live in Wrocław. I ended up there one winter when the city was notoriously in media for having among the worst air in the country and evacuated after trial period. The ruling "elite" is an awful corrupted clique holding multiple public offices each, police regularly beats random people to death. Exclusively outsourcing and nearshoring jobs with miserable salaries, with established cliques in every workplace. The real estate prices skyrocketed yet thousands of "poor" Ukrainians and people from Causasus somehow can afford living there.

[ktosobcy]

> On the contrary it is supported by the reality that inner-cities are unbearably expensive and people need to live in the suburbs just like in the US.

Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)

[ptsneves]

> Noone is forcing people into suburbs (which are awful in itself) but people feel the need to have detached house with garden (as a status, just like car…)

Sure. How dare people not afford 1.2 million PLN( 304k$) so that 4 people (2 adults + 2 children) can live in a 80 sqm apartment[1].

The theme in these answers are very common, the majority of people wanting comfort are wasteful and vain. I guess back in the day of Gierek's(communist times) buildings were the right fit.

[1] https://rynekpierwotny.pl/wiadomosci-mieszkaniowe/raport-cen...

[ktosobcy]

<facepalm>

Yes, because thanks to dumb housing market becoming "investors eldorado" instead of doing more dense residential building that doesn't require creating "subursbs" and dumb urban sprawl.

You are aware that it's possible to create relative big departments in such scheme, right?

[ptsneves]

Yes and I recommend you Wrocław city museum for a showcase of beautifully thought out plans that never went anywhere even when Wrocław was Breslau. It is the reason I was touched by such a mundane topic that I would not otherwise be interested in.

One of the reasons such plans did not go ahead is that it required a state that can expropriate left and right and amounts of capital not available to localities, even in cities like Wrocław.

Those kind of grand plans only work if there is a national drive that imposes it, or most likely after a war. This is true in Poland Portugal or anywhere developed and desirable.

[kergonath]

> People move out to the outskirts, buy more cars and bigger cars and then... they commute daily to the city.

And then moan about traffic jams.

[bluecalm]

Man, Kraków is very car centric by any reasonable measure. There are huge multilane roads cutting through the city in all directions. There is zero enforcement on speed and pollution limits. It's very dangerous to move around if you're not inside a car.

Cars are just too space inefficient as inner city transportation. Traffic jams are the result of car centric choices incentivizing everyone to drive not the other way around.