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.
Hopefully some of the people sitting in parliament will read this. In many cities we still have to fight for bicycle infrastructure. Car centric city designs should really start going out of fashion
The worst is when they install bike infrastructure that will just randomly end and dump you onto a busy street, and then complain no one is using the fancy new bike lanes…
Have some of these here. Absolutely wild, that the bike lane ends where it would become useful: Before a traffic light, so that you have to take part in the traffic jam of cars.
But what am I even talking about. Traffic lights per se are an anti-pattern of city design.
Only thing is that electrifying vehicles is a little easier than rebuilding a city (or part of it). And it don’t need to be a really old part, even a 60/70 years old city zone is relatively hard to convert. Not to speak of even older zones.
But yes, newly build zone of city should be designed with this in mind.
Just take lanes away from cars
I understand the sentiment, but that could cause more issues than it solves. Cars then would be forced to compete for space with bicycle again,only this time on all bicycle roads. Or houses could not have car access at all, if you’d narrow the streets.
Yaeh ok, but what are the issues you were announcing before talking about the benefits?
There are some model projects of super blocks which are already very promising. They change the nature of car use inside a neighborhood by making pass-through traffic impossible and limiting parking space to only residents as well as making roads very narrow all the while being mixed use. It makes driving faster than 10km/h pretty hard, all the while still keeping it possible for people who really need it.
Cars then would be forced to compete for space with bicycle again,only this time on all bicycle roads.
Why? The other person said: “Take lanes away from cars”. There wouldn’t be any cars on that lane.
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?
Germany (city of Potsdam)
Actually it really isn’t easier to keep things car-oriented because building a city so there is enough room for cars is fundamentally impossible.
I beg to differ!
Is it easier or is it just shifting the cost? We’re talking thousands of cars needing electrification in any given city, at let’s say they get it to an average of $35k each.
Picking a random city, let’s say Cincinnati. They already have some infrastructure but it’s largely car dependent. They have 148k households, of which 44.1% have one car, 25.2% have two, 6.8% have three, and 2.4% have four. So roughly 65k + 75k + 30k + 14k = 184k cars * 35k each or minimum 6.4 billion to electrify them all.
I don’t know how much good public transit costs, but I have to imagine $6.4b can buy a fair amount of it.
Isaac Asimov decades ago imagined a future where nuclear plants provided infinite clean energy, and still people in his cities moved on foot, on large systems of conveyors.
In Paris Montparnasse just after 2000, they had a speed conveyor, like at the airport but accelerating up to (IIRC) 11km/h (and decelerating at the end ofc). Wild times!
They lowered the speed as I guess too many people fell. It wasn’t really intuitive as the handrail didn’t accelerate at the same way so you had nothing to hold onto. I don’t know what happened with the project.
It was called the TGV, Tapis Grand Vitesse mimicking the TGV for Train Grand Vitesse (the French speed trains acronym).
I mean, I don’t think conveyors are a good solution, but it’s telling that someone so long ago already rejected cars as a viable transportation method.
I’m starting to have the same feeling about personal jets.
No hatred against minotories please!
