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.
In my (over 1,000 year old) city, blocking several streets with bollards and massively reducing street parking worked just fine so far. As did curbing traffic coming in, with longer “red” phases at traffic lights for cars entering, when sensors detect too many cars in the city.
The “smart” traffic lights idea is very interesting, never heard of it. Which country is that?
smart lights come in other forms:
- If you are speeding, the next light detects it and nearly guarantees you get a red light
- If you are not speeding, your license plate is read and entered into a lottery where you can win money from the pool of money collected by traffic violations.
I don’t recall which country implemented what, but IIRC Canada, Sweden and Spain each had one of the above two systems.
If you are not speeding, your license plate is read and entered into a lottery where you can win money from the pool of money collected by traffic violations.
That’s the most dystopian and borderline insane thing I’ve read for some time.
We also have restricted access to the center of the city (the infamous Area C and Area B) even stricter but so far they are not working that well simply because they created them but not added the necessary alternatives (public transportation first and foremost).
Where I lived when I was younger, to be able to have a neighborhood that is not that dependent on cars (back at the time it was not, everything you need was at a 5 minute walk) they basically levelled the neighborhood and rebuild it, and it was relatively new (post WWII), a thing that is not an option in older area (center).
The way of your city (or of Milano) are also appliable only to big cities where everything you need is present, where I currently live I need a car for a number of reasons, because my small town has not all what I can need, for example the only way to go to the train station I use is by car since it is too distant to walk to (or I can choose the other one and hope to use less than 1.5 hours for a 20 minute train travel), and there is not a public transportation system.
Maybe I am naive but I think that people would discard the car (or use it a lot less) if for the day by day they have an alternative, so when I said it would be easier I should have added the missing implicit (for me) part “in the short term”.
You want I don’t own/use a car in 5 years from now ? Fine, where are the construction sites for the railroads and the other public transportation system I will need to use ? Because I can stop using the car in a month, but you cannot build a railroad in a month.
