'For me, this is paradise': life in the Spanish city that banned cars - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life-spanish-city-banned-cars-pontevedra “The historical centre was dead,” he says. “There were a lot of drugs, it was full of cars – it was a marginal zone. It was a city in decline, polluted, and there were a lot of traffic accidents. It was stagnant. Most people who had a chance to leave did so. At first we thought of improving traffic conditions but couldn’t come up with a workable plan. Instead we decided to take back the public space for the residents and to do this we decided to get rid of cars.” (...) The benefits are numerous. On the same streets where 30 people died in traffic accidents from 1996 to 2006, only three died in the subsequent 10 years, and none since 2009. CO2 emissions are down 70%, nearly three-quarters of what were car journeys are now made on foot or by bicycle, and, while other towns in the region are shrinking, central Pontevedra has gained 12,000 new inhabitants. Also, withholding planning permission for big shopping centres has meant that small businesses – which elsewhere have been unable to withstand Spain’s prolonged economic crisis – have managed to stay afloat.

Honestly, if humanity at some point in the future gets to the place of a one world government, we should be promoting more local jobs and services to reduce the impact of these sorts of things. Just read up on the smog of London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London

I'd rather have EVs than take any bus whatsoever. I had to do it a dew years ago in Lisbon where theres a heapload of public transportation, and it wasn't good at all when done under the blazing sun. Factor in having to walk ludicrous distances from one place to another and it got even worse.

I tried being pedestrian only in college for a few months, and doing something as simple as walking to the grocery store was a bitch. We would go every two weeks and have to bring our bikes. It took about 10 mins to get there and we would buy two weeks worth of groceries. Transporting it back meant we had to get off our bikes and walk home because we would have to hang the groceries on the bikes handlebars, put them in the basket, and carry them in our backpacks. Once I forgot my wallet and then got a flat tire on the way back to my apartment to get it. It took more like 40 minutes to get back. Once I got my car, there was no turning back. I could go to any grocery store I wanted; I went to the whole foods in the suburbs instead of the ghetto kroger in the city. I simply cant go back to not having a car. You have so many more choices with a car.

This is an argument against shit city planning, not an argument for cars, by the way.

It really depends on the country, European countries generally have public transport that isn't complete trash so living without a car is viable.

This is just based on my experience in my city that driving downtown is a complete waste of time. Hindsight is 20/20, but in planning for dense urbanization it makes more sense for people to stop outside of the downtown core and take rapid transit (ie: trains or shuttles) into the city if they work there, and have large highway bypasses to move commuters away from the core. You can be sitting in traffic idling your engine and literally see crippled old people walking down the street faster than your car moves, it's pointless and yet if you need to go through the city to get somewhere else, there's not necessarily any highway bypasses designed to do that.

Regardless, I wouldn't want to go without a car, especially now that i live in a more suburban area. It's hard as hell to be without a car in America

I was indirectly making fun of America's addiction to cars, in case you missed the subtext.

Oh, ok. I mean the city planning is only shit if you don't have a car. There is a bus system in Richmond, but I wouldn't use it

That's my point. A city planned around cars as the primary mode of transport is inherently a shit one.

Maybe if it was Europe, but I think something like 90% of Americans own cars. Things are really spread out and theres a lot of open space in America. The only reason I didn't have my car with me was because I was in college and the cost to park the car would've been like $300 a semester. Eventually I got a job while at school and paid for the parking permit and it was soooooo worth it

Actual cities aren't planned around cars. You can get around DC, NYC, or LA just fine on public transit. It's the suburbs where cars are the primary mode of transport, and they only became that way because cars were readily available.

I don't see how designing a city around buses is any different than designing them around cars. I think Richmond, VA counts as an "actual city". This is kind of an elitist opinion

Not sure how you're getting 'elitism' from the fact that suburbs != cities. Richmond wasn't planned around buses or cars, it was designed for foot and horse traffic, operated the first electric streetcar system in the US, and organically grew from a small city post-Civil War into suburban sprawl because cars made it practical. Very few cities in the US were 'designed around cars'. The suburbs that grew out of cities are an almost uniquely American thing; the cities themselves were designed around pedestrians and public transit.

It'd be pretty poor planning to ignore that the vast majority of Americans, even the ones living in the city itself, are going to have a car they will use to get around with and not account for it. Only really dense but still altogether large places like DC, NY, etc. have any real reason to plan otherwise, and even then, but I guess I'm only speaking for DC here, they usually have parking areas where you can hop on a train or bus somewhere nearby. As someone who'd much, much rather drive myself whenever it's possible, I can't complain.

People will get all up in arms about environmental health, but they'd rather live in cardboard huts drinking rainwater than ban cars. They'll buy hybrids and tell themselves that they're helping the earth, when in reality they're just hurting it less. I was pretty neutral on thus topic for awhile, but after living in Tokyo for I cant see anything other than public transport being the absolute best idea for cities.

Right but the city I was describing in college was Richmond. There's plenty parts of the city that are hard to get to without a car that AREN'T in suburban sprawl. Things are just spaced out apart because most people have cars. I'm saying there are plenty of cities that aren't big cities that were designed in some way with cars in mind. Sometimes it's not even a planning thing: sometimes things are just spaced apart because it doesn't make sense to build a grocery store down the street from another popular grocery store if everybody is driving everywhere.

If everyone who use cars take the bus instead, you reduce traffic in the city by 2000 to 5000%. And that's without taking subways into account. Because of that, you no longer need to make wide-ass roads that take forever to cross, freeing up a sizeable amount of space in the process. Bus lines also don't need to go literally everywhere, stops only need to cover everything within walking distance (say, ~5 min). So that's less roads per se and more narrower pedestrian pathways. Again, more space. With cars out of the picture, you can also get rid of parking spaces and parking lots, which make for a ludicrous proportion of US inner city area. This saves a lot of space as well. In order to shorten the duration of transportation, neighborhoods should be more "self-sufficient" as well. This means residential, commercial buildings and workplaces within walking distance of each other, instead of dedicated, huge zones kilometers apart of each other. So now you've got a lot more free space, which means you can densify your city even more, which, provided you respect the aforementioned zoning rules, reduces distances even more, making walking or biking even more convenient compared to busses, which means less infrastructure required for PT, and so on... So no, the two design philosophies are very different actually.

I always hated advocacy for this; When you get rid of parking spaces and lots, then I just have to drive around in circles looking for a parking spot angrily. Lots of Americans commute to the cities and live in the suburbs so this would pretty much cut off access to those cities. I'm sure no cars would make it easier for people who actually live IN the city, but there are so many people who work in the city and commute home. People in my area commute from as far as 50-60 miles away. Cars are pretty much what make the suburbs possible. Without cars and planning cities around cars, then the suburbs basically wouldn't exist

You're missing the point. Cars wouldn't be allowed in the city, period. You only need parking lots near stations outside the city. Commuters who live outside and work in the city would simply need to leave their car there and continue using PT. It doesn't take more time either. In Paris, most people commute via the subway/tram/bus. It takes less than 30 minutes to get from any point of the city to another this way, so it's not like it takes more time either. And you don't think it's a pain in the ass to have to drive 100 to 120 miles every day, and have to drive in traffic jams inside the city on top of that? Which would be a good thing, both logistically and environmentally.

well then you'd just be moving the massive amounts of parking from inside to city to outside the city. people would still drive to work, you'd just make it less convenient for them in the last mile of it. It's a pain in the ass but it's much nicer to live in the suburbs than the city Maybe so, but the average person's quality of life would drop. People live in suburbs because they're generally cleaner, have less crime, are cheaper to live in, and give you the opportunity to afford a house. I lived in the city during college and decided that I hated living in the city. It's all suburbs for me now

There's a resort town in upper Michigan that has a similar ban, it's called Mackinac Island. Absolutely beautiful place to visit.

In the US if you can't afford a car you're usually destined to be homeless or incredibly shit off though. America's city planning was hijacked by the auto industry decades ago and the poor and disabled have been paying for it ever since.

Yeah but like 90% of American households have a car. Suburbs rock, cities are dirty and full of crackheads

Only if you are in Porto since the Lisbon subway is mostly subterranean.

Not really, no. When you build parking spots and lots in a city designed around cars, you have to plan for enough spots near every building to accommodate for maximum possible demand. That means parking lots near workplaces are near-full during weekdays, and near-empty during weekends, and vice versa for parking lots near commercial and resort areas. Thus, globally, in a city, you have a lot more parking spots than cars at any one time, which means a lot of unused space. Now, consider delocating those parking spots to concentrate them near out-of-city stations. Since commuters, shoppers, tourists, party-goers all use the same public transportation network and thus all go through those stations, you only need to build as many parking spots as the all-time maximum amount of people, instead of the sum of every all-time maxima amounts of people in every specific area. The maximum of a sum is always lower than the sum of maxima, and so that solution will result in much less parking space overall. You also didn't consider that there's a lot more space to build parking lots outside the city than inside, so it causes less issues to do it there anyway. As for your last point, I still don't get how the hell one can consider that it's more convenient to have to drive in traffic with all the stress it entails, than to take public transportation for a shorter duration, all the while you can do something else because you don't have to keep your hands on the wheel. ...And in France the suburbs are the shitty areas rife with crime and lackluster infrastructure, while cities are the most attractive areas to live in. It's not a universal rule. Suburbs being nicer than the city in the US aren't inherent to the nature of suburbs and of inner cities. It's simply the result of poor urban planning that makes the suburbs seem more convenient in comparison. Eventually people will have to leave the suburban lifestyle behind if we are to tackle environmental issues properly. It's a huge waste of resources and energy that we need to do away with. See, this is the kind of mindset that I see from a lot of posters here, Americans in particular. Rather than look for optimal solutions, you prefer to seek convoluted ones to retain convenience (or rather, perceived convenience). This is not a sustainable solution. A fleet of individual vehicles, EVs or not, will always pollute more than an equivalent fleet of busses, subways and trams. It's also not as optimal regarding use of space as a no-cars approach because the area of asphalt required for traffic alone is greater than the one required for public transportation.

Improvement of existing technology is more convoluted than completely overhauling our urban planning and displacing suburban communities so that we can shoehorn in new public transit systems? What? I live outside DC and go into DC regularly. While I enjoy being able to drive to a Metro station and leave my car there so I can take a train into the city, it also takes twice as long on a good day (let alone if Metro is on fire, or they're Safetracking, or any other bullshit that happens on a regular basis), costs more, makes it impossible to buy anything I can't comfortably carry, and still involves having to drive my car someplace. It's not 'perceived convenience' to have the option of driving. It's more convenient. You also seem to have this idea that American cities are big parking lots with tons of wasted space so that we can fit all our cars. That's nonsense. Go to Google street view, start at the capitol, and see how many big parking lots you find. Most people either park on the street or in garages built into the basements of offices. In contrast, out in the suburbs where those Metro stations are, you can find large areas taken up by parking lots because Metro infrastructure has to be above-ground and has a large footprint. This has been an ongoing problem with development of the DC Metro along the Silver line, because there isn't room for building parking lots in Tyson's Corner or out towards Dulles, so rather than being a way for commuters to get into the city for work the new stations have become little more than a way for city-dwellers to get into the suburbs for shopping. American cities are not designed the same way as European cities. I've extensively used public transit in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Rome, and none of those cities are laid out like New York City, DC, or Seattle. Paris and London in particular have excellent public transit and if I lived near either I would be happy not using a car to traverse the city, but nowhere in America looks like Paris or London. You seem to have the perception that we just don't know better, but frankly I think when it comes to US cities you don't understand what makes them different.

So all I can conclude is that it's a cultural thing. I prefer the convenience of a car to take me places, and being able to live in the suburbs. I like having the choice to go wherever I want without relying on someone else (public transportation or uber of w/e)

You should try living in an area like I do. If if you don’t have a car, you can’t get around very easily. There’s a dedicated city core with a great transit system, but i don’t work there so I don’t have access to that. The city and its surrounding areas is spread out, you need a car, and if you’re like me and need to transport objects for work, you literally can’t do that without a car.