Meh, in so many places (in the US) you would need to flatten the entire city and start from the ground up to make no parking and instead here is public transportation that would work. That’s the unfortunate world we live in. Or because of how public transportation so often works, you spend the ‘poor’ tax of so much more time getting places. Oh need to get to work that is five miles away? it’s 1 hour each way by public transportation, or 20 minutes by car with traffic.
Actually you don’t really have to “flatten” anything, the parking lots are already flat enough. Remove asphalt and build mixed-use housing there. Take away a couple lanes from cars and build a tram line or at least a dedicated bus lane. It’s not that difficult if there’s political willpower for it.
Funny thing, flattening the entire city is what did happen in the 20th century. But for cars.
Bad transit and big parking lots are a policy choice, and many cities around the world are showing that we can still make better choices. We don’t just have to put up with car shit.
If the U.S. is so large, then don’t we have plenty of room to build the necessities of life (stores, schools, offices) near where people live? The size of the country has next to nothing to do with the layout of a city. That’s absurd.
You could think that, but the only reason historical cities built tight and dense was 1. lack of transportation and 2. lack of space. Since the US is much younger with neither of those issues, you see people spread out. It’s why the American ‘dream’ is home and land. But that means to get places you need transportation, and since everything is so spread out, it would be next to impossible fiscally to have adequate and speedy public transportation.
Meh, in so many places (in the US) you would need to flatten the entire city and start from the ground up to make no parking and instead here is public transportation that would work. That’s the unfortunate world we live in. Or because of how public transportation so often works, you spend the ‘poor’ tax of so much more time getting places. Oh need to get to work that is five miles away? it’s 1 hour each way by public transportation, or 20 minutes by car with traffic.
Actually you don’t really have to “flatten” anything, the parking lots are already flat enough. Remove asphalt and build mixed-use housing there. Take away a couple lanes from cars and build a tram line or at least a dedicated bus lane. It’s not that difficult if there’s political willpower for it.
That’s just a lack of imagination.
We took a long time to get here, yeah. But you’d be surprised how little work it takes to make things easy better, too.
A little bit of car dieting in the last decade where I live and there’s, like, 3-4 times the pedestrians as there once were
Houston it’s taken 50 years with few regulations and while better is still very car centric.
Funny thing, flattening the entire city is what did happen in the 20th century. But for cars.
Bad transit and big parking lots are a policy choice, and many cities around the world are showing that we can still make better choices. We don’t just have to put up with car shit.
A lot of place around the world aren’t as large as the US either. It’s not as simple as ‘fuckcars’ would make you believe.
If the U.S. is so large, then don’t we have plenty of room to build the necessities of life (stores, schools, offices) near where people live? The size of the country has next to nothing to do with the layout of a city. That’s absurd.
You could think that, but the only reason historical cities built tight and dense was 1. lack of transportation and 2. lack of space. Since the US is much younger with neither of those issues, you see people spread out. It’s why the American ‘dream’ is home and land. But that means to get places you need transportation, and since everything is so spread out, it would be next to impossible fiscally to have adequate and speedy public transportation.