Instead of just electrifying vehicles, cities should be investing in alternative methods of transportation. This article is by the Scientific Foresight Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), a EU’s own think tank.
Instead of just electrifying vehicles, cities should be investing in alternative methods of transportation. This article is by the Scientific Foresight Unit of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS), a EU’s own think tank.
Hopefully some of the people sitting in parliament will read this. In many cities we still have to fight for bicycle infrastructure. Car centric city designs should really start going out of fashion
Only thing is that electrifying vehicles is a little easier than rebuilding a city (or part of it). And it don’t need to be a really old part, even a 60/70 years old city zone is relatively hard to convert. Not to speak of even older zones.
But yes, newly build zone of city should be designed with this in mind.
Actually it really isn’t easier to keep things car-oriented because building a city so there is enough room for cars is fundamentally impossible.
The point is not to build (or reshape) a city to have enough room for cars, but to build (or reshape) a city so that you don’t need to have (or to use so often) a car for the day by day.
But yes, you can. Our cities are basically build this way, the only problem is that they are build with much lower number of cars in mind.
The worst is when they install bike infrastructure that will just randomly end and dump you onto a busy street, and then complain no one is using the fancy new bike lanes…
Have some of these here. Absolutely wild, that the bike lane ends where it would become useful: Before a traffic light, so that you have to take part in the traffic jam of cars.
But what am I even talking about. Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
It’s a pro and a con. Cars waiting is a good thing. Car drivers chose cars for convenience so anything that makes them inconvenient is a positive factor to getting them out of cars. I’m in a place where bicycles can turn right on red but cars cannot. And there are cycle paths through woods and fields and niche trafficlight-free places cars cannot go.
I love traffic jams because cyclists are immune to them and car drivers can only sit in frustration as they get passed by cyclists.
A couple intersections are still fucked up though, where cyclists might have to wait for ~2-3 differently timed lights to cross an intersection. Luckly red light running is not generally enforced against cyclists.
That’s the wrong way. Bike should be made more convenient. But artificial worsening is no good thing.
That doesn’t work. Making cycling more convenient is only noticed by cyclists. Car drivers see the inconvenience of pedaling. To them it’s harder work to move slower. You can’t offset that in any material way that’s noticed by car drivers from the comfort of their loungy cars as extensions of their living room.
This is why I did not transition from car to bicycle. I needed a mass transit middle step. Mass transit includes the notable convenience of being chauffeured around, not having to look for parking, maintenance free. Then after getting accustomed to waiting for the tram and being locked to the public transport schedule, cycling becomes a viable upgrade from public transport (no waiting and more autonomy).