405
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
405 points (95.5% liked)
News
23275 readers
3788 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
See, the thing is, those roads that were 45mph have more than enough room for both cars and bike/ped infrastructure. The issue is that, generally, the lanes for higher speed roads are wider. Narrow the lanes and people feel they have to go slower to stay in the lines (which is true for a lot of drivers, bless their hearts). It's an unconscious response to narrowing roadways that can be used to actually make people slow down, rather than just telling them not to. And when you narrow the lanes, that leaves more room in the same space for stuff like bike lanes and sidewalks.
Yup and I’d LOVE to see some of those four lane roads get turned into two or three lane roads with protected bike lanes
However, in a city that’s primarily optimized for cars and lacking in other forms of infrastructure, the main impact of traffic calming measures is to make it really hard to get anywhere in an efficient manner. I don’t believe it significantly improves safety, but it will undoubtedly make a lot of people who rely on their cars absolutely miserable.
The root of the problem is that we simply have too many cars on the roads to begin with. However, we can’t reasonably ask people to stop driving until the alternatives are as safe and convenient as a car. The primary focus should be on urban planning that makes walking, biking, or taking light rail an attractive alternative. In the case of walking and cycling, this overwhelmingly means dedicated infrastructure.
You've got that entirely backwards: driving must become painful in order for people to support funding alternatives.
Edit: downvote me all you like, folks, but it doesn't change the fact that we've been trying to do it the other way for decades and it doesn't fucking work.
You're being downvoted, but that's exactly what many europeans cities have been doing for many years now. When going into the city center by car is the worst option, people choose other ways to go.
Did those cities already have good mass transit set up to facilitate a better option, I legit don't know? I like this plan but I wonder if it will be successful with how absolute dog shit this country's mass transit is.
Maybe, but that's a moot point because so did cities in the US. Take some of the biggest poster-child cities for car-dependency, Atlanta and Los Angeles, for instance.
Here's what Atlanta's streetcar network looked like in 1924:
And here's what LA's streetcar network looked like in 1938:
We had good cities with public transit in the US. We didn't build our cities -- even sunbelt ones -- for the car; we demolished them for the car.
One more example. Here's downtown Houston from the 1970s:
All those parking lots used to have buildings on them.
The difference is that those cities are denser, better laid out for walkability, and have tremendously better public transport.
But if you can't get people to support alternatives, how will you get them to support making driving more painful?
Even if the government does nothing, that'll happen naturally over time as increasing traffic chokes itself out.