Not a horrible idea if you have solid, simple, and actionable plans to replace them with robust, simple, and effective public transport options. Otherwise… yeah, a bit too far.
Uh huh, and what about material delivery to stores, restaurants, &etc in the city? What about postal service?
We should absolutely invest more in public transit, but light rail and buses are not logistics solutions.
Trains carry cargo all the time. I don’t think it’s too crazy to suggest light rail be adapted to do the same.
Sorry. Good luck transporting a washing machine or full kitchen on public transport.
And we’re going to build rails to every store, restaurant, and other business that needs cargo pickup & delivery? And run a train to each of them, every day? And you think that would end up being more efficient/environmentally friendly than trucks?
Who said we were abandoning all of them?
Street vs Road.
You can totally have delivery vehicles for stores on a street, but no other cars are allowed.
This is different from “ripped out completely”, which is what is proposed in the article. So the answer to your question is that Dr. Fuller said that.
Nothing says abject stupidity like taking an argument to its extremes no matter the cost.
Tearing out extra lanes that do nothing but encourage more traffic, adding protected cycling lanes or reducing road speed are seen as extreme by those that made the decisions that have created the infrastructure we have. In reality these are compromises.
‘Share the road’ is not a compromise. Sharrows are not a compromise. Jaywalking laws are not a compromise. Victim blaming is not a compromise. Media dehumanising pedestrians is not a compromise.Nobody ever fucking considered anything else but cars, drivers and the car lobby when installing these things.
Now tearing it out city centers to focus on humans and humanity is extreme?
Well, you sure know what you’re talking about, you-need-to-allow-white-pride… 🙃
Taken out of context. I also said that you-need-to-allow-black-pride…
But you keep taking the Redditor approach to things, sifting through peoples history to attack things they said out of context, instead of actually making a meaningful attempt at a discussion. It’s BOUND to make lemmy a replica of the place you fled from.
Really meaningful attempt at starting a conversation like so, troll? https://lemmy.world/comment/5742227
Is it also out of context when you compare your straight daughter’s experiences to, and I quote, „Jews during the holocaust“?
Maybe nobody wants to have a meaningful discussion with you because you’re an outrageously obtuse asshole.
So what did we do before we had widespread cargo trucking? Did we just not deliver any cargo ever? Everyone just wandered around dropping limes all over the place 'cause they’d only figured out how to carry them with their bare hands, until Henry Ford invented gas station sushi and revolutionized transportation forever?
Well, in the interest of not wasting everybody’s time, I’ll tell you: they organized their towns and cities around rail. This happened right here in the United States, with the stated example being in Philadelphia. Even the old West Coast cities were organized in much the same way for a long time. That was the only way they had available to them, and somehow, they still managed to have an economy.
We have a lot of retrofitting to do to regain that ideal. But it’s possible.
So what did we do before we had widespread cargo trucking?
Agrarian society - wagons and hand carts.
they organized their towns and cities around rail
Towns and cities were significantly smaller and less complex. Rail does not scale. Adding new rail spurs is prohibitively time-consuming and inflexible.
Seriously, how would you propose to handle citywide garbage/recycling collection with light rail and no motorized vehicles? (Just for instance).
Your history is wrong. We had begun industrializing about 100 years before trucks were invented and more like 160 before they really became dominant.
And are you literally arguing that building rail is more cost prohibitive, time consuming, and inflexible than building roads? Like actually? Unironically? I’m sorry, buddy, but when you start getting into numbers, that’s my territory and you’re out of your depth. https://alankandel.scienceblog.com/2014/01/11/rails-vs-roads-for-value-utilization-emissions-savings-difference-like-night-and-day/
If only we properly invested in history education in this country. Then maybe people wouldn’t be embarrassing themselves by making arguments like yours.
Trucks were invented in 1890s. By 1900 the world’s population was 1.6 billion, 5 times smaller than it is now.
But population numbers aren’t the only thing that has changed since then.
A hundred some years ago FDA didn’t exist. You could buy eggs, meat, etc. from your local farmers and butchers. Now, you need licenses and to comply with a whole bunch of different codes. Fewer people can comply with those, so the average distance things need to be shipped has increased.
There’s, also, a lot more things nowadays that were never possible to produce locally (or even just close by) to begin with. Semiconductors, medications, even fine fabrics for clothing require fairly complex processes and logistics. You can’t just plop a fab or a lab in every large-ish city - that is going to be even more of a nightmare to supply with resources necessary to keep it running, than shipping final product from somewhere else far away.
All of those are phenomenal arguments for heavily reinvesting in our freight rail.
Are you fucking kidding me? Have you ever had to transport anything jeavor or large in real life?
Of course they haven’t. That’s something for the help or their parents to worry about.
Oh great, how many cargo bikes would we need to carry a pallet of milk cartons to the local grocery store? How many would we need to replace one truckload?
Doesn’t matter because you also need a refrigeration system to keep the milk from spoiling. Good luck putting that on a bike.
Someone got lucky https://www.kleuster.com/en/produits/refrigerated-cargo-bike/
A government adviser has called for roads in cities to be “ripped out completely” to combat air pollution.
First paragraph.
Who besides rich boys can afford to ride their bikes to work?
Single mothers getting their kids to elementary and middle schools?
The elderly going to their doctors appointments?
Working stiffs who can’t afford to live in downtown?
What do you think will happen to rents when is forced to get an apartment in one of the existing blocks?
You seem to be under the impression that a bicycle is more expensive to buy and run than a car. I’d love to see your working for this.
Renting a home close enough to your workplace to make biking every day practical is usually more expensive than owning a car and living further away - especially if you have a family and need more than a studio apartment. In that sense, owning a bicycle and not a car is more expensive.
That said, this could be fixed with better public transit.
The average US commute is about 30 minutes.
That distance on bike in a city is about 10 2.5 hours.
In a city you can go about 5 miles in 30 minutes on a bike
I live in a city with an MSA of, let’s call it 2 million people.
What is it going to cost to cram 2 million people into a 5 mile circle and not have roads to bring in food?
The average US commute distance is 20 miles one-way. That’s about 2 hours by bike at a slow-ish pace (10 mph). Did you accidentally calculate a walking pace (2 mph) which would take the 10 hours you suggested?
Before COVID, I used to often have a 45 minute commute by car or a 35 minute commute by bicycle. It’s an 8 mile bike trip that is easy enough for me, a not particularly fit 56 year old, or a 9 mile car journey with 25 minutes of sitting in traffic. An electric bike would make it even easier to go further.
So, I’d question your numbers.
Who besides rich boys can afford to ride their bikes to work?
i bike to work in no small part because i can’t afford to drive there
Single mothers getting their kids to elementary and middle schools?
in civilized countries, they can use a cargo bike (what the dutch call a bakfiets) to carry the kids. or the kids can ride their own bikes.
The elderly going to their doctors appointments?
many elderly people can still cycle. you may even see electric assist tricycles on the bike path in civilized countries. and of course elderly people also benefit from accessible and convenient public transit.
Working stiffs who can’t afford to live in downtown?
this is a real concern and i absolutely share your desire to build large-scale dense public housing developments in downtown around transit stations, as well as doing the same around more outlying transit stations such that taking public transit also becomes a viable option.
What do you think will happen to rents when is forced to get an apartment in one of the existing blocks?
wait, i thought you wanted to build public housing to address housing affordability? was that just me offering a solution, and not you? that’s weird
That is not a solution, it is a communist fantasy.
How are you supposed to have busses without roads?
So all we have to do is get rid of rent and make everyone live in government housing,
Magically levitate supplies into the stores,
Get my 90 year old parents and people with sick infants to bike in to the doctors in the snow and rain,
So these lawyers on their $2,000 carbon fiber Trek bicycles can win their argument at city hall.
So these lawyers on their $2,000 carbon fiber Trek bicycles can win their argument at city hall.
Speaking of fantasy, you certainly have some interesting thoughts bouncing around in your head.
I can’t read the article (paywall), but it seems to me that there might be a distinction between road and street that some people in this thread don’t know about.
I’ll quote the main bit, standard problems and he’s not wrong about the solutions. Why should London residents put up with rich out of London drivers polluting where they live? There is a tube and train already. Cutting down the number of routes for through traffic and turning the old roads into parks would be great. And exactly what is already happening in places with ltns
"He cited a north London councillor who described traffic as an “invasive species” that “swamps all other types of transport”. Up to 80 per cent of people living on arterial routes in urban areas did not own cars, with most of the pollution being caused by motorists driving into and through their communities.
Pointing to the “greening” of city centres such as Seoul and Utrecht, he said: “We should start changing our cities and actually start thinking about ripping out road infrastructure and turning them into green spaces or green transport corridors. We have to look beyond traffic.”
This needed to be combined with a drive to get people out of their cars and into walking, cycling and using public transport, which would not only help tackle climate change but also improve health and so reduce pressures on the NHS."
Pointing to the “greening” of city centres such as Seoul and Utrecht
