Cities Without Traffic

[marmar]

x-posted from the fantastic Public Transportation and Smart Growth group http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=forum&id=1130


from the Flat Iron Bike blog:



Cities Without Traffic
Posted on December 26, 2014 by Zane Selvans


It’s an underlying axiom, a chanted mantra, a litany:

More people means more cars.
More cars means more traffic.
More traffic means more congestion.
We hate congestion, ergo:
NO MORE PEOPLE.

The litany was recently recited by John D. English in his Daily Camera guest opinion, imploring Boulder to “preserve our quality of life” by protecting the right of motorists to drive in the city without encountering traffic congestion. But cars are not inextricably linked to people, and the freedom to drive everywhere is not quality of life. Equating these things stalls infill development in the name of auto dependence, and keeps half the city trapped in late-20th century office park purgatory. It preserves not quality of life, but underused asphalt oceans, impenetrable superblocks, and sad bike lanes painted on the side of roads that might as well be freeways.

The assumption that more people must inevitably mean more cars means different things to different people. To the member of traditional Motordom with an interest in infill development, it means we need to build more regional road capacity (induced demand be damned!). To auto-dependent neighborhood activists who cannot stomach the thought of Change in Our Fair Town, it means infill is unacceptable.

.....(snip).....

http://vimeo.com/108884155

Parking is a ridiculously powerful policy knob. If you build a city with zero parking, you can be sure there will be zero cars. It’s an impossible to ignore, durable physical mandate. Do we need to turn this particular knob all the way up to eleven to keep congestion under control while our population grows? Probably not. But it’s there in our back pockets, and it’s a much more powerful and economical stick than any of the carrots we have left at our disposal.

Does this sound like some harebrained utopian scheme? Zürich, Switzerland already does it. They haven’t built a new parking space in the city since 1996. The city is consistently ranked as one of the cities with the highest quality of life in the world. To quote John D. English: people are “free to move about their community with ease.” They just don’t do it with cars. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://flatironbike.com/2014/12/26/cities-without-traffic/

[roody]

1. Knr

[zeemike]

2. I Would love to live in a city without cars.

The closest I came to it was Seatle in the late 50 although still cars were king, there was electric busses that came by every 15 minutes that would take you anywhere in the city...if I remember right the fare was 15 cents.

[SheilaT]

3. I would love to end up in a city with good public transportation so that I could live without a car.

I was recently in Portland, OR, and they have an excellent public transportation system, so they're on the list.