Nimby crash course, vocabulary edition!
Roads in the 21st century incarnation of English almost always refer specifically to car infrastructure.
Streets are not the same as roads, it describes the space between two rows of properties. Modern streets typically contain a road for cars, but also sidewalks, trees, gardens, lounge spaces, etc. There’s a reason it’s called street food and not road food, because they’re selling on the streets and not in the middle of the roads where they’ll get run over.
Every time something like this gets brought up, you always get Nimbys screeching how this will evict everyone from their homes or whatever, and I think it’s because they think removing roads means also removing the streets themselves, when in reality it means the streets get restored and become much more welcoming and people friendly.
I wonder how he thinks how supermarket shelves or the storage of his favorite restaurants are filled. He might be in for a surprise when no trucks will be delivering anything in the city. Or does he believe his local Tesco is getting it’s wares by tube?
It’s not clear from the way the article quotes him exactly what he said should be “ripped out completely”. You seem to be interpreting it as “all city roads should be ripped out completely”.
I suspect he’s saying we could rip out many city roads, completely turning them into green spaces and with forms of more active transport. I don’t think this is saying remove all roads to the extent goods vehicles can’t enter.
Gasp how will we maintain capitalism if we can’t exploit and pollute the earth?
So we simply dissolve cities instead? Without inflow of goods, workers, and customers cities are not able to survive.
Goods:
Rail, tram, cargo bikes interconnected at re-implemented logistic centres.
Workers:
Public transport, (electric) bicycles
Customers:
Retail will change, but cities will not lose their function of overspecialisation.
To take this to its logical conclusion, once the streets are gone, there is no need for buildings anymore, so they can tear those all down and plant a forest. But then you wonder where you are going to put all the people who used to live and work there.
At this point, I’d settle for taking the 2-lane road segments in my town that turn into 4-lane nightmares and then merge back into 2-lane streets a dozen blocks later with bike lanes and parking, and getting rid of the 4-lane parts that often don’t have sidewalks or bike infra.
Sure, these road segments funnel traffic away from the more-residential city grid streets, but they’re also rife with speeding and they make it hard to navigate on a bike unless you happen to know which streets have any sort of infra
