You don't have to rip-up the roads, you can just replace (some of) the buildings around them. Replace one house in a residential neighbourhood with a grocery store and you've already drastically reduced the amount people need to leave the neighbourhood.
And you won’t need to park cars on valuable street area. Ideally they’d only stop to load/unload passengers, or to charge. That would free up many more lanes on city streets.
Abolishing minimums does allow you to do things like build a nice compact downtown with lots of parking on the edges. Drive to downtown, park, walk a hundred yards to your destination.
In some Canadian cities, they build the residential streets with only one lane (there’s still traffic in two directions), and it solves both the speed problem and helps with the density problem. I hated it at first, but once I’ve parked my car (probably to take the bus, no less), I’ve thought, gee this is nice.
City planners could just make narrower streets (like 1-way alley kind of narrow). No need to ban cars, instead design the streets so other modes of transport are more convenient.
As a bonus the land you would have used for wider streets can be used for something better.
One alternative, if you're not fond of the idea of banning cars altogether, is to do the same thing that you see a lot over here. Basically any street people live on is a dead end, or almost a dead end. Taking a shortcut through a residential street basically doesn't happen.
Take the neighborhood I live in for example, It's all one-directional traffic with tight corners and speed bumps. It has more exiting streets than entering streets. The end result being a decided lack of traffic, while still being able to get a car to your front door when you need it.
Kids can play in the streets safely enough, There's a couple cars an hour most of the day and the few cars that do pass are going slow enough to not hit any kids. The most dangerous time of day is all the parents getting their kid out of school by car.
You sometimes see a commercial vehicle trying out a new shortcut. People only think that to be a good idea once. Going around is faster than going through in any case.
Carless doesn't have to be an absolute. It's a gradient from six lane highways through your neighborhood on one side, and no cars at all on the other. A balance needs to be found.
In 90% of inner city streets you could just block through traffic for cars and reduce traffic to almost zero, without inconveniencing people living there.
Were I the dictator, I'd just narrow the roads to one lane plus on-street parking and replace the freed area with trees or bushes (or tram tracks). Narrowing forces cars to slow down, making pedestrians safer and allowing bicyclists better blend with the traffic. Cutting down on the lanes adds congestion which effectively removes unnecessary car travel from the city area, encouraging people to walk or pedal. I would also remove huge parking lots as they alienate pedestrians and increase car travel. Certain downtown streets or blocks could be made pedestrian-only zones.
You don't need atonomous vehicles to make this work. A good public transit system within the city, decent bike lanes and some park and ride options for getting in from the outskirts could be enough to make up for the reduced parking options.
Indeed - but as noted in the article, you'd likely be exempted in that situation, and having less congested streets on which to walk, cycle, take the bus, or drive would be a great benefit.
My city converted a lot of 4-lane roads to 2 traffic lanes, a centre-turn lane, and 2 wide bike lanes. It's great, cheap, and it really doesn't affect car traffic at all.
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