this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
324 points (93.3% liked)

Fuck Cars

9797 readers
355 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

While this is a nice thought in theory, it breaks down as soon as you start actually thinking of it in practical terms.

  • Some rural road that gets a few cars a day at best does not really need sidewalks and certainly does not need bike lanes.
  • A road with potholes is more dangerous to pedestrians and bikers due to the potential for cars to lose control, or for drivers to swerve to miss a pothole and potentially endanger other travelers.
  • Adding bike lanes and sidewalks is just impractical in a lot of areas. Where is that space coming from, when private property extends to the road edge currently? Are we just declaring eminent domain and taking 3-6 feet of everyone's property frontage for this initiative? I'm sure that will be a very unpopular initiative. What about areas where buildings are too close to the street to allow for this? There's just too many areas where it's not practical or possible to do.

I'm all for phasing out cars in areas where it's reasonable to do so, but your proposal just isn't compatible with reality.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Where is that space coming from?

You can literally add separated light rail in the center and bike lanes next to the sidewalk and there would still be two car lanes left, one for each direction.

What about areas where buildings are too close to the street to allow this?

This street is too narrow to add a dedicated sidewalk, right?

Which is why the blue square sign is there: The speed limit on this street is walking pace and pedestrians have priority on the entire road.

Therefore: Put bicycle lanes wherever possible, reduce the speed limit where it isn't.

[–] insaneinthemembrane 1 points 6 months ago

However, we could apply the idea to just roads that are compatible with bike lanes and pathways. It would be a start. I agree that priority needs to be given to safety first but even with that, the next priority needs to be anything but cars where possible.