lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.
Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.
I live in Oslo, and that’s not true for here at least. Oslo probably has one of the best public transit systems in the world, at least relative to its population. I never use any form of car, personal or taxi, I don’t even own a driving license, and I can easily get anywhere I want to go. At least within the city.
As soon as you leave the city though, you’re having a problem. Bicycle infrastructure is basically non-existent, cars heavily impeding buses - at least where I live - which delays them all the time and centralised bus hubs, which means that you always have to go to the bus hub first, change bus lines and then go to your destination.
This is also my biggest problem with the metro in Oslo. If you live slightly outside of Oslo but still along the metro line, the only way to travel perpendicular to the metro lines is often to take the metro towards the city, change lines and go back almost the same direction you came from.
I think this is a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Norway is, on a whole, much more rural; a large portion of the population lives in small towns and villages in areas with difficult terrain (think fjords), where public transport beyond a bus is impractical due to population densities.
The public transport in Oslo and Bergen are fantastic - Norway’s only two large cities. Keeping in mind that over a quarter of the population of the entire country lives in these two, it’s not as bad as it sounds.
Attacking SUV drivers is precisely the wrong way to go about reversing the surrender of the public realm to the automobile and it is exactly the right way to start another immature culture war , alienating a lot of potential allies in the fight to reclaim out streets .
Exactly this. There are some clear use cases for cars and even for SUVs (possibly only if you literally live or work on a large farm). There’s no case for driving an SUV in a city. It’s antisocial behaviour at best and actively threatening at worst!
It makes the roads safer and that saves lives. It reduces pollution, saving more lives. It also saves space. That doesn’t save lives, granted, but it’s still a good thing.
If we accept any use cases for cars (and I do, personally), even if it’s primarily in the short to medium term while we build better urban infrastructure, then we should also advocate for those cars to be as small, as safe and as clean as possible.
A street filled with VW Golfs instead of Land rovers, still afforded the vast majority of space in town, still given priority at every turn and still transporting one or two people at a time, doesn’t move us much further forwards .
As is covered in the article, explaining the environmental impact of SUVs to SUV owners does not change their mind or encourage them to get a different car; it is effectively ignored.
So that is where ideas like the deflators come in, you make it more inconvenient, maybe that will work where polite discussion did not.
To be honest, I’m sick of trying to politely persuade people to stop killing other people with their idiotic cars. All cars are bad, yes. SUVs are the worst. It’s perfectly reasonable to try to solve a wicked problem by going for the worst offenders first.
Living in a city with many bicycle lanes along major streets, the toxicity of exhaust gases worries me and doesn’t come as a surprise. Sucks that most people don’t know or care about that
Just claim sovereign immunity, bing boom, so simple. (I have no idea what the consequences of that owuld be, or what the legal outcome would look like.)
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