This is basically just a real estate development with no parking. It’s on a light rail line, and the main idea seems to be to embrace micromobility (bikes, scooters, autonomous taxis) for people to get around. It doesn’t seem hugely pathbreaking to me, but I think what might make it seem pathbreaking to suburban Americans is that the bikes, scooters, human beings, and cars are not in conflict with each other. This is so simple, and yet so pathbreaking. It’s also pathbreaking because it’s in greater Phoenix. We assume this can’t be done in American cities because when we choose to devote most of our space to car maneuvering and car storage, there is not also room for the bikes, scooters, and human beings.
Tag Archives: car free cities
car-free cities
The Guardian has a nice run-down on the state of car-free developments around the world:
- “Oslo revealed plans to ban all private vehicles from the centre by 2019″
- “Helsinki has ambitious plans to make its “mobility on demand” service so good that nobody will want to drive a car in the centre by 2025”
- “Paris’s car-free days have successfully reduced high pollution”
- “New cities – such as the Great City on the outskirts of Chengdu, China, and Masdar near Abu Dhabi – plan to focus on mass transit or electric cars as alternatives to gas-guzzling private cars.”
- “Venice is often cited as the largest car-free city, but they have it easy, with canals and rivers instead of streets.”
- “Hamburg, on the other hand, is currently making waves by enforcing an auto-ban on a number of urban roads to develop a network of route for pedestrians and bikes that link parks and open spaces together.”
- “Madrid, too, is focusing on the city at a human level, and recently hatched a plan to pedestrianise the urban core and expel cars by 2020.”
- “Dublin and Brussels are also toying with the idea of kicking the habit through city centre diesel-car bans, with similar ideas proposed by Liberal Democrats in London following the VW emissions scandal.”
- “Milan is offering public transit tokens to residents for every weekday they surrender their cars”
- “Rome is slowly progressing with parking bans.”
- ” Copenhagen. Unsurprisingly, large swathes of the Danish capital have been closed to vehicles for decades, with bicycle infrastructure reaching into every corner.”
- “Every week in the Colombian capital [Bogota], over 75 miles of urban roads are shut to vehicles.”
- “In Hyderabad’s IT corridor (dubbed “Cyberabad”), a recently launched weekly car ban marks a first for Indian cities”
- in South Korea, a Suwon neighbourhood recently trialled a full month ban in September 2013, which inspired the wealthy Sandton area of Johannesburg to hosts its own car-free experiment last month.”
- “Portland hopes to [have] 25% of trips made on two wheels by 2030.”
- “While modal share for cycling just scrapes an average of 2% in the US, in Davis [California] it’s 20%.”
- “Alongside the expansion of the subway system, segregated bike lanes are slowly creeping into North America’s fifth largest city [Toronto], and there are whispers around a potential car-free street during rush hour.”
Here in Philadelphia, we’re asking if a bike lane is still a bike lane several years after the paint wore off…