Is there a FAQ about living in car free cities? For example, how do you travel to another city? What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard? Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
For example, how do you travel to another city?
Train or car. Car free mostly refers to inner city trips, for special occasions it’s totally fine to use a car (e.g. moving, buying something big, a weekend trip, etc)
What do you do if the city has high slopes making walking and biking too hard?
Bus, ebikes, other types of electric assist stuff, walking. Crazy steep slopes do put a limit on exclusively human powered mobility (i.e. walking and cycling), but those places are incredibly rare.
Or how do elders deal with what other citizens would take for granted in terms of mobility?
A walkable city features amenities close by, plenty of benches to rest, and a solid bus system. There are absolutely no issues for people with restricted mobility. This applies to people with disabilities as well btw.
In fact I would turn that question around: how do elders deal with the requirement to drive a car to get groceries, etc? Isn’t that like super duper dangerous?
I love living in a car free city. I can’t believe America doesn’t build more cities like mine.
SF and Oakland aren’t car-free, they are car outsourced. You don’t drive, you have someone drive you. Other then a very narrow stretch of Down Town SF to Oakland, most of that metro area isn’t served by public transit. Unlike say NYC where most of the metro area IS served by public transit. (It’s still not car free though.)
I love living car free with my needs in walking/biking distance. However I feel like the car centric problem runs deeper than basic groceries and transit to work. I live near the gorgeous rocky mountains, but our buses only really run to the ski slopes, and only in winter. It’s a true shame to be so close to nature and have my option for access restricted to a rental car. So naturally there’s a plan to build the worlds largest gondola directly to resorts to address traffic. Cause god forbid we just ran more effective bus service year round.
“What seems to work best is a carrot-and-stick approach—creating positive reasons to take a bus or to cycle rather than just making driving harder.”
I guess this is why we shouldn’t only play the “fuck cars” tune but also include melodies like “we love to bike” and “public transport is fun” 😉
I feel like this is people about most things. Most people aren’t very imaginative.
They’re kind of stupidly in favor of how things are, but once it changes they’re like this is great I don’t know why we didn’t do it before.
Like imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist and someone tried to create them. Conservatives would shit their pants hating it.
Yah, Plenty of liberals shit them selves when you suggest giving an unalloyed good away for free.
Might be a fun social experiment to propose a public gun lending armory. Like a library, you can walk in and check-out an AK-47 for a day or week for free. But just like the library charges for printed pages, you would have to pay for the ammo.