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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Fuck Cars
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I think the main problem here is for folks forced to drive every day in the dervish of death that is rush hour.
If you can't afford to live near where you work (as is often the case in the UK), and you're already looking at a 1 hour commute both ways, current public transport isn't an option. You can either give up on sleep, or you will have to drive.
A lot of these changes are coming in the wrong order - first you improve public transport, create affordable housing near city centers, and drastically reduce the price (and let's be frank, increase the quality of) public transport, and THEN you hit car users to push them on to these options. In the current order, they just introduce further hardship to folks who already have a bad time.
It might be a little different in the UK, but in North America step #1 needs to be "first you abolish the low-density zoning restrictions that displace almost everybody far away from the city center to begin with." It's not just that walkable housing isn't affordable; it's that it's not even allowed by law to exist.
There is another substantial difference. In Europe you have private spaces to park your car and then roughly as many public parking spots as there are cars. In the US you have about 8 times as many public parking spots as cars exist. The amount of concrete wastelands just for potential cars is incredible.
You could basically scrap ¾ of your parking spaces to create walkable areas with small shops beside the big malls or oversized markets, then do some public transport to those areas (or still drive by car there), just to establich the idea of walking while shopping.
That's no replacement for getting rid of zoning regulations but a realistic start, where changing the zoning (even when the regulation vanish) would need a generation or more to change.
Yeah, the current approach globally - at least it seems to be the same in Germany - is to make the "experience", if you want to call it that, for car users worse to the point that it's worse than public transport in order to force people onto it. There are some minor improvements being made to public transport, but it's of course a lot faster to put up signs for a speedlimit everywhere or even blocking access to certain roads completely than to increase the capacity of a rail network. And as you said, this hits the already disadvantaged parts of the population more, since they more often than not have manual labor type job that requires going into the "office" everyday, that are living further from work, ...
That's not some "approach" but a symptom of conservatives fighting change tooth and nails. And it's always easier to destroy something. So while one side is trying to improve public transport and create proper bike infrastructure at the same time, the other side is sabotaging.
Plus the car centric model was helped along by sabotaging public transport, so it shouldn't be a surprise if doing the reverse is the way to get back.
Disadvantaged parts of population usually don't have cars. For example in Moscow total amout of cars is about 20% of population, in regions it's even less.
Missed one - you actively encourage mobile working so you have less people moving around in total.
I agree here, a larger push towards remote working would definitely help, though such a move would likely come at the expense of privacy (teams is already a privacy nightmare as it is, with wider home work adoption no doubt Microsoft would implement more "features for employers").