How do you think those car centric neighbourhoods got there in the first place?
Little hint for ya: We already bulldozed our cities, and continue to do so, in the name of the auto. Entire neighborhoods appropriated and destroyed for highways that split cities in two.
Highways and stroads that cut us off from our waterfronts, parks, grocers, and each other.
To answer your question, there is a Purpose of the movement: Obviously cars aren’t going anywhere, because they’re useful. They have their place in society. But in cities at least we need to limit the private auto as much as possible. This starts not with banning cars, but designing sensible streets that are made for humans, not cars. Wide sidewalks, raised crosswalks, narrow streets to naturally make drivers slow down, trees and shade, accessible bike lanes and multi use paths that are protected from cars (paint is not infrastructure), banning right turn on red, legalizing jaywalking (a term and law created by car manufacturers) , deregulating some zoning laws to allow commercial and residential in the same area, bringing back corner grocery stores, legalizing middle-density housing, abolishing the cul de sac, turning stroads into either streets or roads and not the unholy combo of the two they are, properly funded transit systems, get rid of parking minimums, get rid of set back minimums, legalize housing without front lawns, put chicanes and slight curves in streets so drivers have to pay attention while driving.
This is streets designed for humans, not cars. With more eyes on the street crime naturally goes down.
As the new generation grows up with city streets that are safe and convenient to traverse, we can start doing things like expanding the transit system now that it has the dense tax base it requires to be funded, we can prioritize bus lanes and tram lines, we can take lanes away from cars and give them back to people, we can claw back the public land from on street parking, we can ban cars entirely from certain streets or sections of the city. By this point, it’s likely housing close to work will be available and cheap enough to afford. Every neighborhood will have a grocer, school, public square, cafe, playground, community centre, and transit stops. This will be paid for with the increased tax base that comes with having a denser city. No longer will you need to drive downtown for work or to go to the bar; you won’t even want to. When you need to visit another neighborhood transit will be so accessible and so much faster than driving that it will be the preferred method.
The world you see around you is not what cities naturally grow into with the invention of the car. They exist in this way due to a number of laws that were very deliberately meant to increase car ownership and prevent the poorest among us from travelling easily within their own city. These laws are meant to keep housing artificially expensive, and to keep you stuck in traffic for 3 hours of your workday. They are designed to get you to buy gas and consume as much as possible, all the time, without thought to how or why you’re doing it.
Alright wow you made that comment much longer and more thought out since I replied - appreciated. I still doubt that we will ever achieve that, but I do understand more about why people are up in arms about it. I also still believe that working to achieve that cause would likely fuck over a lot of people that live in cities already, but you are right that that is already happening anyways. Thank you for the reply.
Sure, but if you disagree with the morality of what was done in the past, why would you compromise your morals and hope that it happens again? I’m starting to feel as though my initial impressions of this “anti-car” movement were correct: a bunch of bored people throwing bitch fits and rallying behind a cause that will never get anywhere. I still understand the sentiment behind it, but your comment does nothing to convince me that it’s not a fool’s errand of a cause.
Are we going to eminent domain people homes and start bulldozing cities down to redesign them and fix the problem?
My friend right here describing what Texas is doing to expand highways because 8 lanes are not enough.
You have it the other way around, car centric infrastructure is what requires destroying cities to build larger streets and gigantic parking lots. Moving away from it starts with eliminating minimum parking requirements and single use zoning laws, couple that with investment on public transit and you have the recipe for human scale neighbors where you are not obligated to own a car just to survive.
Yeah what Texas is doing sounds pretty horrible, I’m not disagreeing with that. You mention a couple of steps that could be taken to partially remedy the problem and begin correcting the course, but from what I’ve seen, the anti-car movement calls for entirely walkable cities, and what you’ve stated is not enough to achieve that.
The city that I’m living in is probably one of the most extreme examples of urban sprawl that I know of. Making my city walkable and not dependent on cars would be impossible without consolidating the population to a much smaller area.
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How do you think those car centric neighbourhoods got there in the first place?
Little hint for ya: We already bulldozed our cities, and continue to do so, in the name of the auto. Entire neighborhoods appropriated and destroyed for highways that split cities in two.
Highways and stroads that cut us off from our waterfronts, parks, grocers, and each other.
To answer your question, there is a Purpose of the movement: Obviously cars aren’t going anywhere, because they’re useful. They have their place in society. But in cities at least we need to limit the private auto as much as possible. This starts not with banning cars, but designing sensible streets that are made for humans, not cars. Wide sidewalks, raised crosswalks, narrow streets to naturally make drivers slow down, trees and shade, accessible bike lanes and multi use paths that are protected from cars (paint is not infrastructure), banning right turn on red, legalizing jaywalking (a term and law created by car manufacturers) , deregulating some zoning laws to allow commercial and residential in the same area, bringing back corner grocery stores, legalizing middle-density housing, abolishing the cul de sac, turning stroads into either streets or roads and not the unholy combo of the two they are, properly funded transit systems, get rid of parking minimums, get rid of set back minimums, legalize housing without front lawns, put chicanes and slight curves in streets so drivers have to pay attention while driving.
This is streets designed for humans, not cars. With more eyes on the street crime naturally goes down.
As the new generation grows up with city streets that are safe and convenient to traverse, we can start doing things like expanding the transit system now that it has the dense tax base it requires to be funded, we can prioritize bus lanes and tram lines, we can take lanes away from cars and give them back to people, we can claw back the public land from on street parking, we can ban cars entirely from certain streets or sections of the city. By this point, it’s likely housing close to work will be available and cheap enough to afford. Every neighborhood will have a grocer, school, public square, cafe, playground, community centre, and transit stops. This will be paid for with the increased tax base that comes with having a denser city. No longer will you need to drive downtown for work or to go to the bar; you won’t even want to. When you need to visit another neighborhood transit will be so accessible and so much faster than driving that it will be the preferred method.
The world you see around you is not what cities naturally grow into with the invention of the car. They exist in this way due to a number of laws that were very deliberately meant to increase car ownership and prevent the poorest among us from travelling easily within their own city. These laws are meant to keep housing artificially expensive, and to keep you stuck in traffic for 3 hours of your workday. They are designed to get you to buy gas and consume as much as possible, all the time, without thought to how or why you’re doing it.
Alright wow you made that comment much longer and more thought out since I replied - appreciated. I still doubt that we will ever achieve that, but I do understand more about why people are up in arms about it. I also still believe that working to achieve that cause would likely fuck over a lot of people that live in cities already, but you are right that that is already happening anyways. Thank you for the reply.
Sure, but if you disagree with the morality of what was done in the past, why would you compromise your morals and hope that it happens again? I’m starting to feel as though my initial impressions of this “anti-car” movement were correct: a bunch of bored people throwing bitch fits and rallying behind a cause that will never get anywhere. I still understand the sentiment behind it, but your comment does nothing to convince me that it’s not a fool’s errand of a cause.
My friend right here describing what Texas is doing to expand highways because 8 lanes are not enough.
You have it the other way around, car centric infrastructure is what requires destroying cities to build larger streets and gigantic parking lots. Moving away from it starts with eliminating minimum parking requirements and single use zoning laws, couple that with investment on public transit and you have the recipe for human scale neighbors where you are not obligated to own a car just to survive.
Yeah what Texas is doing sounds pretty horrible, I’m not disagreeing with that. You mention a couple of steps that could be taken to partially remedy the problem and begin correcting the course, but from what I’ve seen, the anti-car movement calls for entirely walkable cities, and what you’ve stated is not enough to achieve that.
The city that I’m living in is probably one of the most extreme examples of urban sprawl that I know of. Making my city walkable and not dependent on cars would be impossible without consolidating the population to a much smaller area.