Love this quote: Mayor Fernandez Lores was unmoved. “It’s not my duty as mayor to make sure you have a parking spot,” he said at a 2020 conference. “For me, it’s the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you’re going to put them.”
It really absurd how much governmental bending over backwards we make for people to store and move their private property wherever they please (and subsidies)
It really absurd how much governmental bending over backwards we make for people to store and move their private property wherever they please (and subsidies)
But only if that property is a car. God forbid you want to use that same space to store anything else.
Yes my condo assocation does have bike hangars I was able to install in my space but only 2 and other than that only a car and one grocery cart is allowed. I can’t put a storage cube in my space rather than a car for example.
What strikes me here are
- cars are still allowed but heavily limited to when necessary or of very high utility (eg for certain kinds of delivery)
- they have a car “interface”: car parking facilities at the edge of the town
- Public transport is also limited as the city is highly walkable, which forces me to wonder how much the public transport v cars is a bit of a false dichotomy.
Public transport is also limited as the city is highly walkable, which forces me to wonder how much the public transport v cars is a bit of a false dichotomy.
It is also just a pretty small place, there’s less need for public transport when everything is within walking distance.
Public transport is not a simple matter. You have different modes: buses, trains, trams, subways, monorails, etc. The best solution depends on the city population, density, distribution as well as geography. In Europe, a lot of small cities and towns are walkable, so there’s no need for public transport (at least, surface one), and in some cases, subways are not feasible, or too expensive.
But for most big cities, yes, prioritizing public transport is the way to go. We need to change this car-centric mentality, because it’s not sustainable. But it’s not the only problem big cities have at the moment.
Here in sweden a lot of towns don’t have their own lines and instead just rely on the buses they run to other places, mostly the town-town routes that run at regular (if sparse) intervals.
Sweden is also a great example of how just having good non-car infrastructure isn’t quite enough, you also need to make driving annoying or people will generally just keep driving.
Wow, such a cool concept. I grew up in a city of around the same size, (~100k) it would have been incredible to go from one end to the other without having to worry about being hit by a car on my bike.
