Car brains are out in force for this thread, lol.
Apparently, if you can’t transit products by car or truck, directly to the front-door of every business, the city will collapse.
That there are cities that have actually done this doesn’t seem to stop them insisting it’s impossible.
Something I think is sort of ironic is that in my neighborhood most of the last mile delivery happens on bike. This isn’t because of a lack of automobile infrastructure but because there are too many automobiles. Nowhere to park or even idle the van for a short time.
I do also suspect it’s more convenient for the delivery person to hop off a bike at each stop than it would be to park a car and get out etc.
If I were a city planner I’d integrate that system into my strategy. Ripping out every road is of course hyperbole and clickbait, but ripping out every other road seems like a no brainer. But I seriously doubt converting 3/4 or more of the roads for autos into pedestrian/bike/tram/greenspace would shake things up too bad. Just make sure to keep main arteries open for automobiles and ensure there’s centralized parking garages (street parking is a blight) within a decent walking distance and I think people who need to have a car in the city will get used to it fast.
Hey so I come from a european city from 778, with most of the streets having been the same for over 500 years now.
Heineken truck drivers manage to supply bars and restaurants throughout the city with little to no problems and most of that is pedestrian zoning with exceptions for deliveries and it works quite well.
This is an excellent point too - removing streets for general use doesn’t necessarily also exclude commercial delivery use and so forth
Name five, with populations higher than 50,000.
You know there are dozens of major cities that have converted major roads, and entire precincts, to foot traffic only… right?
Turns out it’s pretty easy to transport inventory in hand trolleys a few blocks as most major cities, especially business districts, are flat as fuck.
“converted major roads” is very different from “ripped out completely”
entire precincts, to foot traffic only
I actually live next to a few places that have done this… with one or two streets for about 3 blocks in a downtown area… and they all have streets on the backsides to handle cargo delivery and trash pickup… so again, not “ripped out completely”.
The great thing about FOOT traffic, is you don’t need roads. You only need paths (e.g. the sidewalk) to bike or trolley inventory around.
How about YOU provide evidence of ANYWHERE converting blocks of a suburb or city to parkland, and suddenly facing the supply chain crisis you hypothesise? If you can’t, then your argument is imaginary and based on nothing but your own biases… and maybe you should support change until there’s reasonable evidence that it doesn’t work… and no, a sample size of one is not evidence.
There isn’t any township of any appreciable size (>50k pop) that has completely ripped out road infrastructure that I know of. I can’t prove a negative.
Do you have an example of a location that has done so?
Point me to where someone is suggesting this? Sounds like a strawman
You’ve bought into a strawman if you believe the intention is to remove all road infrastructure from an entire city. No city on earth would ever do that.
Imagine if every second parallel street were a grass strip, instead of a road. Fire trucks, ambulances, vans, etc could still drive down them as needed, and nowhere would be more than a couple of blocks from a road, but regular traffic capacity would be cut by 50%, and so would pollution.
Fuck_cars on Lemmy is great, I feel like I’m really fighting for the future every time I come here.
On Reddit it was just people trying to out meme each other
Fuck_cars on Lemmy is great, I feel like I’m really fighting for the future every time I come here.
Lol
These people also forget that “delivery trucks allowed” is common. Cutting out 95% of cars and leaving delivery vehicles is fine.
I worry more about emergency services access…
Emergency services have a lot of problems delivering care in current city traffic.
Sure, but if they don’t have any roads to travel on what then?
But I’ve seen another comment mentioning the distinction between roads and streets so I guess that might explain why I can’t imagine how that would be realistic.
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They even exist with a camera and AI to automatically detect emergency vehicles.
In the Netherlands they use bike lanes.
A two way bike lane is wide enough for emergency vehicles like an ambulance, and bikers get out of the way.
What is your proposed alternative solution for logistics in any moderately dense urban area? Like never mind New York, you couldn’t make this work in Little Rock.
Why don’t you read the article? It’s all spelled out right there.
What? No it isn’t.
No part of the article discusses replacing the logistics function of cargo vehicles, but it does propose ripping out the road infrastructure they run on.
Apparently, you are unaware that cargo bikes are a thing.
Right… and how many such bikes would you need to replace the carrying capacity of a single 18-wheeler?
This is not a practical solution.
Also, not discussed in the article and not relevant to my previous comment.
18 wheelers are not last mile delivery vehicles and have no business being in cities to begin with.
Um, yes they are? 18 wheelers deliver goods to stores all the time. How are you even trying to make this argument? What kind of vehicle do you think usually pulls up to a loading dock?
Oh, this lie?
Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of car journeys were under two miles and 60 per cent under five miles. “You could really walk two miles. By the time you get in the car, parked it, you have arrived there in the same time,” said Dr Fuller.
Yeah that’s totally going to get people to charge their behavior and not piss them off.
By the time you get in the car, parked it, you have arrived there in the same time,” said Dr Fuller.
This lie?
Speaking solely for myself here: I used to have a mental block that prevented me from calculating travel time by different modes equitably. If it was a 10 minute drive, or a 20 minute walk, my calculation was anchored to the 10-minute drive as the “real” amount of time, and so the 20 minute walk always felt like a waste of 10 minutes. I think it’s easy to fall into this trap, especially when our lives are busy and we’re trying to save time anywhere we can. But a 20 minute walk is 20 minutes less I have to go to the gym, and 10 minutes less that I have to be hyper alert and driving a 2T vehicle around other people.
Additionally, this mental block existed for me around time spent parking and walking from my car to my destination. Obviously I had to walk from my car, so my brain saw that as +0 minutes. But when I calculated it, I found that I was often spending meaningful amounts of time on this leg:
My urban office is 6 miles from my suburban home (metro area approx 2.5MM people). Even with a highway for half the trip (which gets clogged with commuter and freight traffic during rush hours) the drive is approximately 20-25 minutes during light traffic, or as long as 40 minutes if traffic is particularly heavy. I have to park in a garage, which involves circling for a spot, and then have a 15 min walk to my office. On a good day, 35 minutes. On a bad day, almost an hour.
But taking my ebike (which I only bought because of the many steep hills between me and work) through back roads and sidestreets, it’s 35-40 minutes door to door. Now I get 35-40 minutes of exercise without having to go to the gym, and my vehicle is parked right at thr exit to my building. Plus, I can charge the ebike with company electricity instead of having to pay for gas for my car.
Yeah that’s totally going to get people to charge their behavior and not piss them off
It pisses a lot of people off when they can’t park right next to their destination. But that already happens. There is a limited amount of space at places people want to be, so someone will always have to park farther away. Circling the nearby streets for parking is also annoying as fuck, and a huge waste of time.
Currently, no. But with mixed zoning, it would become more amenable to change over time.
This is a fantasy. It can’t be implemented in large scale in any practical sense.
Centralization of distribution and centralization of production is always more efficient. You aren’t going to put dairy farms next to apartment buildings next to orchards next to paper manufacturing plants next to microchip fabricators next to restaurants next to family homes next to waste water treatment next to hospitals next to bookstores next to power generators next to garbage incinerators next to grocery stores…
These things get separated from each other for good reason, and running rail lines to all of them will never be practical. There will always be a need to fill the gap with small, independently powered vehicles for cargo transport.
You know, for someone who complains about other people making strawman of them, you sure do seem fond of it yourself.
Someone: “We should reduce our dependency on cars and shift our infrastructure planning toward other modes of transport wherever possible.”
You: “SO YOU WANT TO TEAR OUT ALL ROADS EVERYWHERE AND EXECUTE PEOPLE FOR OWNING CARS?!?1!?!1?”
“We should reduce our dependency on cars and shift our infrastructure planning toward other modes of transport wherever possible.”
This is not what the article says.
SO YOU WANT TO TEAR OUT ALL ROADS EVERYWHERE
This is closer to what the article says.
A government adviser has called for roads in cities to be “ripped out completely” to combat air pollution.
This is the first paragraph of the article.
…and then you actually read the article past the misleading click bait, right? The Telegraph is a conservative paper, they have an interest in smearing anyone who challenges the status quo.
Up to 80 per cent of people living on arterial routes in urban areas did not own cars, with most of the pollution being caused by motorists driving into and through their communities.
Pointing to the “greening” of city centres such as Seoul and Utrecht, he said: “We should start changing our cities and actually start thinking about ripping out road infrastructure and turning them into green spaces or green transport corridors. We have to look beyond traffic.”
That is not something a reasonable person would interpret as ripping out 100% of roads. Especially since he references real projects like Seoul.
ripping out road infrastructure
K
ITT: trolls seizing upon a clickbait headline and out-of-context quote in order to make blatantly delusional strawman arguments.
It’s literally two idiots contorting into ludicrous shapes just to stay mad about this. It’s wild.
WHAT ABOUT THE TRUCKS??? I am going to quote one clause of the article over and over to prove I didn’t read it and get mad at people who suggest that anything could change in any way, ever! Trucks are part of human DNA and the moment an 18 wheeler can’t smog up your back yard is when we have all lost our freedumb!!!
People not realising the Telegraph is one step up from shitty xenophobic racist shitrags like The S*n
Ok, then why was an article from this source even posted to this community in the first place, and why is it popular enough to be at the top of the community right now?
If it’s such a bad article and source and does not represent the values of this community, shouldn’t it have a lot more down votes? And also fewer community members defending the content of the article?
I upvote it because I see a headline like this and go “damn, based” and then I move on with my life without reading the article or the comments. I think that’s what most people do, man. It’s a coincidence that I noticed the votes to comments ratio and decided to check it out because when its this even it’s usually a shitstorm worth reading.
If it’s such a bad article and source and does not represent the values of this community, shouldn’t it have a lot more down votes? And also fewer community members defending the content of the article?
I get the impression that the Lemmy “fuck cars” communities have a much larger percentage of concern trolls (case in point: you, frankly, who inspired the comment at the top of this chain in the first place!) than the R*ddit one did. It might be a function of smaller community size + relative ease of reaching “All” [what’s a good way of notating that for Lemmy, BTW?]. It could also be a difference in moderation zealousness and/or priorities, although I feel like I’ve noticed the same phenomenon across both !fuckcars@lemmy.world and !fuck_cars@lemmy.ml, so maybe not (I haven’t been paying close enough attention to be sure, though).
It’s okay to say Reddit, nobody will arrest you.
It doesn’t deserve to have its name spoken.
So basically, this community is an echo chamber that will upvote any drivel which supports the prevailing narrative no matter how poorly written or thought out, and shout down any dissenting opinions or critical voices and dismiss them as “trolling” (which I am obviously not doing, as I am directly addressing the content of the article that was posted).
Yeah, I’m sure the quote is completely out of context and the guy who’s also
called for people to limit the use of “personal care products”, “computers” and “printers” in their homes which he said were contributing to pollution.
isn’t just one of those “back-to-monkee, comfort is unnecessary” types.
Not sure what his beef is with computers, but to be fair, laser printers and aerosol products like hair spray and deodorant really are pretty bad for indoor air quality.
laser printers
Hot paper smells so nice though 😮
I really want people to continue to use deodorant
Also ITT: a lot of people who didn’t actually read the article and are instead making arguments based on their feelings.
Story of humanity.
I mean… it’s not a particularly in-depth article. Do you have a better source with more context for Dr. Fuller’s comments?
The burden of providing better context is on the people who support this point of view, not on the people criticizing what the article says.
Gentle reminder: This site is basically a tabloid at this point and should not be used as a serious source. If you have to, at least use an archived version.
I can’t read the article (paywall), but it seems to me that there might be a distinction between road and street that some people in this thread don’t know about.
I’ll quote the main bit, standard problems and he’s not wrong about the solutions. Why should London residents put up with rich out of London drivers polluting where they live? There is a tube and train already. Cutting down the number of routes for through traffic and turning the old roads into parks would be great. And exactly what is already happening in places with ltns
"He cited a north London councillor who described traffic as an “invasive species” that “swamps all other types of transport”. Up to 80 per cent of people living on arterial routes in urban areas did not own cars, with most of the pollution being caused by motorists driving into and through their communities.
Pointing to the “greening” of city centres such as Seoul and Utrecht, he said: “We should start changing our cities and actually start thinking about ripping out road infrastructure and turning them into green spaces or green transport corridors. We have to look beyond traffic.”
This needed to be combined with a drive to get people out of their cars and into walking, cycling and using public transport, which would not only help tackle climate change but also improve health and so reduce pressures on the NHS."
Pointing to the “greening” of city centres such as Seoul and Utrecht
Not a horrible idea if you have solid, simple, and actionable plans to replace them with robust, simple, and effective public transport options. Otherwise… yeah, a bit too far.
Uh huh, and what about material delivery to stores, restaurants, &etc in the city? What about postal service?
We should absolutely invest more in public transit, but light rail and buses are not logistics solutions.
Trains carry cargo all the time. I don’t think it’s too crazy to suggest light rail be adapted to do the same.
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And we’re going to build rails to every store, restaurant, and other business that needs cargo pickup & delivery? And run a train to each of them, every day? And you think that would end up being more efficient/environmentally friendly than trucks?
Every store? Obviously not. Running cargo trams through major business or industrial districts, though? More plausible, if the will exists.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarGoTram
Something like that, but as a public service.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarGoTram
The main route went from the logistics center in Friedrichstadt via Postplatz and Grunaer Straße to Straßburger Platz and finally on to the factory.
This went from one logistics center to one production facility. It is insane to think that this could be a scalable solution.
Wow, a train line goes defunct in a country that heavily subsidizes car infrastructure and actively works against other modes of transportation. I’m shocked, really. Shocked.
I didn’t say anything about it going defunct. That has to be one of stupidest attempts at a straw man I’ve ever seen.
I pointed out that it only ever carried material from one location to one other location, and that such a system would not be scalable to serving an entire city.
Did you even read my comment?
Sorry. Good luck transporting a washing machine or full kitchen on public transport.
Delivery of a full kitchen is not something that makes up the majority of traffic. I don’t think anyone is saying you can’t use a van for the “last mile” in such edge cases.
Even washing machines can be delivered by cargo bike/trike though.
How would you ‘use a van’ if the roads are “ripped out completely”?
You do understand nobody is talking about ripping out all roads everywhere, right?
Right?
It’s literally the title.
I can’t even understand down voting this, unless you’re delusional.
Have a look at the Netherlands friend. I’ve seen people towing dishwashers behind their bikes more than once while living there.
A dishwasher isn’t that heavy. A washing machine is.
We primarily use small vans. Eg. Utrecht, the example mentioned in the article:
And that’s fine. You can have almost no cars, but still use vans when they’re required.
Hell, do like the small Swiss town in that Tom Scott video. Abolish cars for private individuals or the able bodied. But you’ll still need (small, electric) cars and vans to transport the heavy stuff.
That and tradespeople often use their van as a mobile workplace. Tablesaw, semi-complete inventory of parts they may need, etc.
You joke, but I have done this. Wheelchair accesible trams are awesome for this. Put appliance on hand truck walk it into the tram. No heavy lifting required like when loading it in a car.
A washing machine? That shit’s heavy.
A cheap logistics hand truck carries weights up to 250kg. If you need more it become a bit annoying because you need to switch to using OSB Boards with casters.
Source: My life and helping friends move.
Bonus: Hand trucks are really convenient to transport full size kegs and CO2 bottles to parties by tram.
Who said we were abandoning all of them?
Street vs Road.You can totally have delivery vehicles for stores on a street, but no other cars are allowed.
This is different from “ripped out completely”, which is what is proposed in the article. So the answer to your question is that Dr. Fuller said that.
Apparently you didnt read past the headline and dont want to understand the content… welp, cant help ya there.
“We should start changing our cities and actually start thinking about ripping out road infrastructure and turning them into green spaces or green transport corridors."
You mean that ‘rest of the article’?
Nimby crash course, vocabulary edition!
Roads in the 21st century incarnation of English almost always refer specifically to car infrastructure.
Streets are not the same as roads, it describes the space between two rows of properties. Modern streets typically contain a road for cars, but also sidewalks, trees, gardens, lounge spaces, etc. There’s a reason it’s called street food and not road food, because they’re selling on the streets and not in the middle of the roads where they’ll get run over.
Every time something like this gets brought up, you always get Nimbys screeching how this will evict everyone from their homes or whatever, and I think it’s because they think removing roads means also removing the streets themselves, when in reality it means the streets get restored and become much more welcoming and people friendly.
Wow, post is getting a lot of traction. Wish some of the actual actionable ones had the same level of activity
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Paywall.
At this point, I’d settle for taking the 2-lane road segments in my town that turn into 4-lane nightmares and then merge back into 2-lane streets a dozen blocks later with bike lanes and parking, and getting rid of the 4-lane parts that often don’t have sidewalks or bike infra.
Sure, these road segments funnel traffic away from the more-residential city grid streets, but they’re also rife with speeding and they make it hard to navigate on a bike unless you happen to know which streets have any sort of infra
Eh, keep some for emergency & delivery vehicles, public transport and bicycles.
They don’t actually rip up roads but just put retractable bollards there that are lowered for emergency vehicles and cargo delivery with a permit.
They do rip up roads, just not quite literally all of them. You’ll always have at least one lane, depending on the location. But the rest, including parking spaces, can be replaced with something else like greenspaces instead.
I think the ideal is an alternating block structure
Pedestrian Street,
Road,
Pedestrian Street,
Transit only Lane,
Pedestrian Street,
Road,
Pedestrian Street,
Transit Only Lane,
…
Where Pedestrian streets cross roads, have car traffic enter a roundabout sunk below the pedestrian path, when they cross transit lanes, have a gate bridge that closes off the lane whenever a tram or bus isn’t near the crossing, same deal when car traffic crosses a tram or bus lane
Voila, maximum restriction of cross interaction between three separate modes of transport, a full 75% of which is dedicated to pedestrian and transit use, and the last quarter there mostly just for the benefit of last mile package delivery and emergency services, as well as the odd profession that legit has to use automobile transport for whatever reason.
Where do bikes fit in your overall design?
On pedestrian streets like in Amsterdam, apparently they’re less aggro when they aren’t sharing the road with 2 ton death machines
@PhlubbaDubba @throws_lemy I think it’s very sad that you think that “road” is synonymous with cars.
I mean it literally is, like the highway regulators literally use it as a byword for “car only lane”
Pothole’s Paradise like in parts of Africa
Could have just said LA, kinda weird to just choose the continent of Africa.
I don’t know about “La” what is it ?
I do know parts of Africa are like that.
I don’t know about all continents but I do know there are mostly good roads in many other continents (Europe, parts of Asia …)
I wonder how he thinks how supermarket shelves or the storage of his favorite restaurants are filled. He might be in for a surprise when no trucks will be delivering anything in the city. Or does he believe his local Tesco is getting it’s wares by tube?
It’s not clear from the way the article quotes him exactly what he said should be “ripped out completely”. You seem to be interpreting it as “all city roads should be ripped out completely”.
I suspect he’s saying we could rip out many city roads, completely turning them into green spaces and with forms of more active transport. I don’t think this is saying remove all roads to the extent goods vehicles can’t enter.
Gasp how will we maintain capitalism if we can’t exploit and pollute the earth?
So we simply dissolve cities instead? Without inflow of goods, workers, and customers cities are not able to survive.
Goods:
Rail, tram, cargo bikes interconnected at re-implemented logistic centres.
Workers:
Public transport, (electric) bicycles
Customers:
Retail will change, but cities will not lose their function of overspecialisation.
Nice fantasy. Nobody will pay for the first, the second will be a complete illusion with the current state of public transport (and how you want to get people with 30+ km commute one way to bike, even electric, will remain an unsolved riddle). The only thing with the third is, you are right, it will change, I.e. it will kill off in-city retail completely.
To take this to its logical conclusion, once the streets are gone, there is no need for buildings anymore, so they can tear those all down and plant a forest. But then you wonder where you are going to put all the people who used to live and work there.
On a train, bus, bike, and foot. Odd, it’s like cities existed for 4 millennia without cars.
Who said anything about streets? The article only mentions removing roads, which makes sense to me
Average muskbrain energy here.
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Have fun keeping up economic output.
Fuck economic output, I want to be happy and healthy and live in a world that I’d actually want kids to grow up in.
I want to be happy and healthy
This is dependent on the economic output that you consider expendable.
For instance, there will be no modern medicine without microchip fabrication, and really the entire global electronics industry from top to bottom. Without that extraordinarily complex production system woven through our economy, you’re basically back to 1940s medicine.
Yes, it’s impossible to do things differently. If there were no roads, all chip fabs would be demolished along with their custom local power plants they usually create on site.
But maybe they could keep some production going so that the chips for security tags could still be produced. With no roads, how would the police chase all the shop lifters.
