Never forget Top Gear’s episode racing through the center of London. Results as follows:
It wasn’t even really close.
This times 1000 any dense cities with sufficient transit should be car free.
with sufficient transit
That's an unnecessary qualifier. Cities without sufficient transit should also be car free – and get sufficient transit.
Some will need to be rebuilt. The entire design forces cars. You'd have to level half the city where I live to even make a start at making it transit friendly.
It's still worth it, but we need to understand this is something that will take our lifetimes. We will not see the benefit. It will be our children, or possibly their children. We're going to have to rebuild nearly everything.
Difference is that some metros are a car centric hellscape
If you banned private vehicle use in cities without sufficient transit, overnight such transit would, as if by magic, suddenly appear. Private bus services are a thing.
You all heard Captain Slow.
Hand over them keys.
Actually, that would be amazing. Unfortunately, living in a major North American city, I don't have enough wealth to be without a car.
Man I really wish we weren't so entrenched in this car-centric city planning philosophy. Public transit just doesn't get it done around here compared to abroad.
Cars need lots of space. Streets and roads need to be wide, and parking lots are needed when cars are not in use.
These factors push everything far apart. If you think of North American shopping plazas in suburban areas, they are generally large empty spaces with parking lots between stores.
If you want to cross the street or road to the Walmart or HomeDepot in the plazza accross the one you are in, you generally need to drive or walk 20 min or more, and you need to walk to a main intersection with pedestrians signals, good luck trying to cross 4-6 lanes of suburban traffic with shopping bags.
Let alone, local transit stops are located outside the plaza's at a major intersection generally with a 15min walk to the store entrance.
The urban planning is extremely inefficient and poor.
Works fine as long as you don't mind being late. Limiting your travel times. Tripling the length of your commute. And braving a mobile-psychiatric dayroom environment in order to go anywhere..
I regularly transit between Heathrow and downtown. It's about 13 miles or so. Regularly 45 minutes to an hour and a quarter, and as much as an hour and three quarters if there was some event letting out at the time. For such short distances I don't think I've seen any US city compare. Sure, some have bad hours or short segments of regular congestion, and I've driven from one side of the country to another, but London takes the cake for shitty driving most any hour of the day for such a short transit.
This is insane. 13 miles for 45 minutes to an hour plus. Bike, scooter, electric something. All those cars running just to sit and wait.
Have you seen Top Gear's race across london from 16 years ago? Now it's even worse
Haven't seen it but I'll upvote for your name though.
When cities are built for cars, like liège. Then cars won't have many issues there.
But liège is a shithole not worth visiting ☺️
It's really fun watching cars struggle in Ghent. Just use a bike
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