Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.
Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.
Okay. I’ll tell my city to just tear down half of it so they can build a better system.
Like I said, not all towns and cities were designed for it. It’s not something you can just plop in centuries down the road. The world doesn’t work that way.
Any new development should have public transit in mind. Old development can’t really be retrofitted. It’s like you missed my entire comment.
In many places the cities were retrofitted for car centric infrastructure already, why couldnt it happen again?
Car-centric cities waste tonnes of space on parking which sits empty most or all of the time. Improving them requires less knocking stuff down and more filling in the gaps.
Luckily your city doesn’t have to pay for this - since property developers will do it for you to make money for themselves. You just need to fix the regulatory barriers: remove parking minimums and legalise mixed-use zoning.
If you want to accelerate the process, your local government can adopt the Japanese model: build rail or light rail and then develop dense areas around or above it. This is generally profitable but requires taking on a decent amount of initial risk.
So it can be done. But sitting around grumbling about how a better future is impossible because everything has to stay how it is right now won’t get us there.
