All topics urbanism and city related, from urban planning to public transit to municipal interest stuff. Both automobile and FuckCars inclusive.
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While we're at it, ban SUVs and Light Trucks, by making a separate licence for them. If you need one for work? Or for personal use? Get a license that proves you know how to use one.
SUVs and Light trucks have done so much damage to our society: both by being dangerous as fuck, and in the insane amounts of pollution that emit. It's about time the United States, and any other country that hasn't yet, apply bandage to the wound. Slow the bleeding. Then the healing can begin.
You're completely right. So many people here drive massive land yatchs with more horsepower than sense.
Not only that but they cause a lot of noise pollution, air pollution, and just take up space they don't need to be.
I drive a Camry (and I’m a big dude) and some lady almost hit me in a parking deck the other day driving a massive Yukon. Like wtf.
This needs to happen if we want to end the madness. We should also start making our car lanes smaller in more urban areas, and by law exclude vehicles in the higher SUV/light truck category from entry, unless they are there for specific reasons (ie construction), and have a documentation of some sort to back that up. Lastly, for those few cases where this type of vehicle is genuinely needed, there has to be some sort of requirement in place that SUV/Light truck vehicles are designed in a way where they can actually see what is in front of them. the new usps truck design is a good example of what I mean here.
My concern is that private vehicles really must be allowed access to medical centers, which are often in city centers. Most patients can’t ride the bus/train/bike, and no taxi driver or ride share wants a barfing miserable person in their car. Door-to-door transportation is crucial in medical situations.
Isn't this what ambulances/non-emergency medical transport is for?
I mean, where I'm from you have two different medical phone numbers, one for emergencies, and one for non-urgent help, like transport to chemo or other regular treatments.
Edit: As in: a securing of health infrastructure should be included in the car-free discourse. Having free and easily accessible medical transportation would make the argument for less private cars much more palatable.
I'm studying in a medical profession where I frequently attend to people in their homes, sometimes urgently (midwife in Canada). We are all required to have private cars to drive to people's houses and meet people at the hospital for births and assessments.
If the medical system would give me a free car to use for my profession that would be cool... But I'd also have to use it just like a private car because you can get called to a birth while grocery shopping since you're on-call 24/7 as a primary care provider.
Home care does actually take others off the road which is a fun bonus though. The first week of birth and postpartum assessments taking place in the home saves clients about 8 car rides which is great because riding in a car or driving during labour is no bueno and postpartum riding sucks. After a C-section you can't drive either. Even in a hospital delivery postpartum care occurs in the home which people find an absolutely fantastic experience. Those appointments aren't emergencies but there can be emergencies...
I know of one bike midwife. But that's extremely rare and all students must drive.
Thats a really solid perspective. Again, where I'm from, Denmark, midwives and the like, especially at-home help, have their own cars with the regions seal on the side of the car. So that part is also solvable.
My argument is based on: fewer cars = good. Especially in urban spaces. I'm not saying cars have been totally solved in Denmark, far from it, but with a solid network of bikepaths, sometimes more space for bikes than cars, and many exclusive bus lanes, not having a car isn't an issue. In fact, in our capital, you can't get somewhere faster with a car than with a bus/metro.
The main problem with going less cars as I see it is mostly gear transportation. How do you bring whatever kit you need for your job, if you can't bring a car? This question remains unsolved.
Totally agree with you that the fewer cars the better, and using cars and trucks as specialty tools.
Have you seen the YouTube channel NotJustBikes? His entire channel is a gold mine for this kind of stuff. He actually has a video on Canada's only car-free community (Toronto Islands) and there is a very small number of transport vehicles available. Otherwise people just use those cart bike attachments for moving stuff around. The roads were built decades ago and basically have never need to be replaced because the bikes are too light to damage asphalt...
I've seen that name around on Nebula. Seems like he does good stuff! Thanks for the recc
I'm just glad that there is finally a little pushback to the urban-hell model of urban planning haha
NotJustBikes is honestly a force of nature I think. His content is so awesome he's basically created a new generation of urbanists. We need people like him because his content can actually change the world.
Of you don't know where to start on his channel, the Strong Towns 4 part series is essential viewing. It's a summary of the Strong Towns research project/community and it basically presents decades of expert research as a tidy little series. Everything else is window dressing to the core messaging of that - crappy spread out suburbs are financially insolvent and cannot sustain themselves. Towns and cities die without a reliable tax base. Everything boils down to that. There is a 30 year cycle where new suburbs pay for the old ones and in 30 years they become a net negative to city budgets.
Mississauga in Ontario recently ran out of municipal land... Their strategy has been suburban expansion for decades. Now they're out of room. It wouldn't have been a very exciting headline except now we know that new suburbs must be built to pay for the financial drain the old ones place on the city... So they MUST become more dense or else the city will become bankrupt.
There is also a video on the channel about how Guelph did a financial analysis on what parts of the city are financially productive and which are net negatives on the budget. I'm sure you can guess the results! Really cool 3D bar graphs of the city divided up into blocks/sections. it's just interesting because politicians always always pander to suburban voters and people think suburban tax money pays for inner city programming or whatever and the reverse is the truth. The inner cities are the ones subsidizing the suburbs. Density = people = economy. Population density = productivity = money.
Imagine if politicians ignored homeowners and focused on the people actually funding the budgets? Suburbs are a financial drain only kept alive by the Ponzi scheme of creating new suburbs to find the old ones. Until you run out of land like Mississauga. Then you get slashing of budgets and lack of programs, decaying infrastructure, etc... Then cities just die like so many have across north America.
In the US these sorts of services are incredibly, even prohibitively, expensive depending on your health insurance situation. This shouldn't be an excuse, but the fundamental ways our healthcare system is broken is a topic of it's own that shows how this is all linked and how much of just our whole shit needs to be fixed before we can have nice things.
Unfortunately these services are privatized and incredibly expensive in places like the US. They are also fairly rare and their fleets aren’t large enough to cover everyone who would need them. Cars (your own or a friend’s) have to fill the gap until something better.
Well, if you're ok with a $5000 to $15,000 of arbitrary fees imposed by the ambulance for what amounts to a 20 minutes ride with few treatments from a couple paramedic who are paid $25/hr. You can get double billed by multiple ambulance companies for the same ambulance ride. In a sane world, your logic is sounds and should be practiced, but in America... well...
Here how it'll turn out if you have a family:
Tl;dr: If you fall in America, the American society love to keep you down forever. There is a growing shift from nuclear family to multi-generational family, because of this fact, we want to minimize expenses and have more safety nets between family members if one of us get hurt.
I lived for years without a car with my family, and parking was never essential for us even though we did get sick on occasion. I'd challenge the assertion that it's "crucial" — at least, it never was for us.
When I was going through chemo, the car was crucial to get to and from my appointments. My immune system was trashed, so exposure to the public was dangerous. I could barely walk. I was out of my head and terribly agitated with the steroids and intense anti-nausea meds, so needed to be contained. I can imagine other situations where a person needs door-to-door transportation to and from a medical center, but isn’t dire enough to require an ambulance. (Frail elderly, heavily pregnant women, rural residents, etc.). Everyone won’t need a car all the time, but some will need it sometimes.
Some intense re-structuring of medical transportation would be required if private cars weren’t allowed into medical centers.
Yeah, those scenarios make sense. A lot of times, people are quick to claim they "have to" have a car to do this or that, when really they mean they have never done it any other way. We did plenty of things people would say they "have to" have a car to do.
That said, I can see in these cases where a car might be needed. Seems like it shouldn't be that way, but we have the world we have, not the one we should have. We seem to like putting barriers in front of medical care, and the car is just another one of those.
And in the US, at least, financial barriers are far too often insurmountable. Ambulance and “cabulance” (non-emergency medical transportation in an accessible van) rides are incredibly expensive.
There are better solutions waiting out there, and you are right that we have to start where we are. Start with what we have, and nudge it step by step toward the goal.
Some intense re-structuring of medical transportation would be required if private cars weren’t allowed into medical centers.
this is sort of idly shooting off into the air but: i wonder how much of a commitment it'd be for a country to actually make that kind of non-urgent medical transit a baseline facet of their medical service? obviously you'd have to expand the overall fleet of medical service vehicles a lot; ideally it'd also be both free and state-run (i neither trust nor think private actors will finance this, obviously.)