Quote:
Originally Posted by Aroundtheworld
The car isn't king in a lot of places around the world. It wasn't king when the city was founded. It doesn't have to be kind here in the future.
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There is also the maxim that traffic expands to fit the safe given to it. The opposite is also true: it shrinks when you reduce the amount of space as well.
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The problem is that the car wasn't king when the cities were founded, but a car-sized horse-and-buggy was, and hence all North-America roads and the city block sizes were based on that scale, especially once they were converted from farms to housing. That's why Vancouver has no problems doubling for any major city in North America in a film. It's so cookie-cutter that nobody even notices except those that live here.
European cities long pre-date wagons. They are people scale. That is why street-level LRT's are built over there, because you literately can not build a subway without ripping up entire historical districts, and you can't tunnel because you'll hit ancient ruins/artifacts/garbage/they-moved-the-headstones-and-not-the-bodies every few feet. Then there are places like Venice which are at sea level, and you just can't build a subway, and an elevated rail line would destroy the tourism draw (Venice's rapid transit is literately hundreds of watercraft.)
So when you look at a map of any European city that has existed for centuries (eg Rome Italy, Paris France, London England) you see that people-scale on it, no grid. Any grid-structure you see are where the original farms were turned into housing during the 18th century.
Where as cities like Toronto and Vancouver, were originally planned as grids.
If you take away roads for cars, all that happens is you create more gridlock. Adding LRT/Street Cars just makes that even worse. Hence you get far more capacity by building a subway/elevated rail line that has no dependency on the road. North American roads are arranged perfectly for "car" sized transit, and nothing larger or wider. Vancouver used to have an extensive street-car network and most of it predates the large swaths of SFH. With the car came the loss of the original street cars, and even if we had been able to keep those rails in the ground, nobody was producing street-car vehicles again until the late 1990's when they hadn't been built for 40 years, and what we get are vehicles that were never meant to run in the street.
Like I hope people stop listening to Patrick Condon's urban design fantasy about street cars replacing buses and personal cars. If everyone lived within a mile of where they work, shop, eat and play then yes maybe that would be a thing, but the reality is that people go where they want to go, and if they want to work for a business in Downtown Vancouver but live in a cheaper place in Surrey, they are going to do that, and if you don't want them to, then you need to start building 3 bedroom family-sized condos on top of every commercial/office podium so people don't have to live in a different place from where their job is.
Sometimes I just very annoyed by the people who seek power and yet have clearly unsuitable agenda's when seeking that power.
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This is so true we definitely need left turn signals and right turn lanes.
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