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It’s time for Americans to embrace small cars
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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It's time for Americans to embrace bicycles and ebikes and, gasp, walking
Never gonna happen. Where I live, it's not safe for my daughter to walk the 1/2 mile to school. To make it safe, we would need to install sidewalks throughout town. That's millions of dollars that less than 100 ~~children~~ non-taxpayers would use. And since the school is in the middle of a residential neighborhood, there's not really any other use of the sidewalks either...
As a European, this statement sounds completely insane. I honestly can not comprehend how a nation got to the point of saying "we don't need to be able to walk somewhere from our house so lets not bother building sidewalks".
You and your daughter should cycle to school though. If she's not old enough to go on her own bike, take her with a trailer bike. If she's too young for that then a child seat, and when she's old enough she can cycle on her own.
The idea of using a car to go 900m is just crazy to us.
It's crazy to us too! Unfortunately, we don't have much say in the matter. That said, plenty of kids do still walk to school, and many do have sidewalks, although they're far from universal. The thing is that without the sidewalks you can more easily achieve:
No
Redesign the roads. If you build every road like it's a highway it's obvious that everybody drives insame, can you blame them? Make the roads narrower, people will automatically drove slower.
I can't fathom why they don't make school crossings on small increases in height. Not a traffic bump, just move a piece of 20 meters / yards long up by 25cm / 10 inches with a nice slope to get on and off. If you drove normal you barely notice it. If you drive fast, you'll go flying.
US road engineering literally is decades behind other countries, you still build roads like it's 1960, and you build horrible stroads.