Fun fact from Germany! These giant Christmas markets actually double as parking lots outside of holiday seasons! Everything is temporarily built on top of a giant parking lot!
Furthermore these tend to be close to both major hubs (Think like a central train station!) and some other event areas that DO need the parking (like a football stadium!). That way, while the holiday markets (plural, several a year) are off, the space can also be used as parking space for sports events hosted in the adjacent stadium!
Just some amazing German efficiency for you. Oh also they frequently get used as skateparks.
Also to add (having just spent a good portion of the season going to various Christmas Markets all over Central Europe), a lot of times these central square event spaces are essentially the roofs over underground parking garages. LOTS of multi-level underground parking garages in all these cities.
Well, they’ve probably been markets for some hundreds of years before they dug a parking cave underneath. Old cities especially get increasingly cramped with time.
It’s called an event space and it can’t be occupied all year. There’s stuff going on pretty frequently but when it ain’t, it’s gonna have to be a skatepark + parking lot.
It ain’t just Christmas. There’s holiday markets for every season and even off holiday there is frequent flea markets. It’s even where popular bands will hold their concerts. Without a dedicated space like that, it’s impossible to set up these kind of markets and fairs. It’s inevitable that some days it’ll sit empty.
You try setting up a ferris wheel and rollercoaster in the cramped areas of the city. It won’t work.
As a German, I have never been to a Christmas market held in an event park. I know Christmas markets as just occupying the town square or city centre instead of a dedicated area away from it.
Event parks are in my experience usually just used for fairs, food festivals and sometimes concerts.
Yeah that’s exactly how human civilization has worked. Little known fact, athens was basically a rural town of about 200 people and each dwelling was about 2 miles apart. The ancient Egyptians are so overrated. There were about 120 of them. TV really lays it on thick with Manhattan. Only about 75 people live there in reality, and most of them live on farms!
Perhaps try giving it up, then? You can start by getting rid of your smartphone, then Internet. Electricity, plumbing… Pretty much every comfort…trade.
Oh what’s that? No, to all that? That’s what I thought. It is not civilization you dislike. You like all the sides that benefit you directly. You just have so little empathy that the idea that another human might inconvenience you for a moment with their existence is just beyond your ability to tolerate. A selfishness so extreme, being a hermit sounds enticing if it were just more convenient, eh?
No one is puzzled. This was a case of someone casually scrolling and commenting without critical thought. Which, let's be honest, we are all guilty of that and the other guy taking the opportunity to dunk with an AmEriCa Am I rIgHt???
Saying "I want to know how they deal with parking", assuming they have vast parking garages and a shrug emoji is what I interpreted as puzzled. If you're not clear it's a reference to access to public transportation.
I know. I was just saying that the American in the pic is only puzzled because they are mindlessly scrolling and posting on Twitter. When the time comes to go to an event like that they are also just as likely to take the train without much thought to it either
It's true though that many Americans have never lived in a city with functional public transportation, so they don't even consider it. I lived in a city with a decent light rail system and it wasn't really reasonable because I would have had to walk 1.5 miles across hellish intersections (or taken an uber?) to even get to a train station, and I lived in a fairly urban area.
It wouldn’t, unfortunately. My city got Amtrak service back a few years ago, and sooo many people I’ve talked to are like “I’m never taking a train again!” because they caught a delay ONE TIME, even though they don’t bat an eye sitting still daily on the interstate.
Making it free just for residents is an interesting choice. I guess the argument is that they’re paying taxes to cover the use while non residents are, but then you have to maintain all of the ticketing infrastructure for much lower revenue. They’ve also banned taking bikes on the trams as part of this, which isn’t great.
I don’t like the idea of requiring folks have chips on them & needing bank accounts to access transport. Worse if a for-profit payment processor gets to skim a little off on every transaction.
All of these devices emit traceable signals. If someone doesn’t want to be tracked, which there are tools that do this, folks should have the option to opt out as paper & coins have worked fine for a millennia. But also what you are now proposing is that Google & Apple, two ad companies, get to take a piece of the pie for doing nothing and collecting that user data of what user is going where/when.
Bruh, those payment methods are ubiquitous in developed countries, like those in Europe.
the advantage of credit/debit cards is that you don’t need to fucking buy some obscure city specific card for public transport or need to figure out the tickets, you just tap your card when you get on.
I live in Asia & I’m real happy cash is preferred for everywhere. It’s not some tech startup or credit card’s business how/when I’m spending my money & it’s never been difficult to hand currency to the driver.
Then I guess you’ve never met the most populated continent that seems to be alright as is.
But also we could have free transit before the internet. Wrapping something in technology doesn’t mean its better. A smart watch doesn’t tell you the time any better than are without Bluetooth.
It’s not too make money but they still need money to run it, and in a lot of places a significant portion of that comes from fares. If they’re replacing all of it with money coming from elsewhere then great.
That’s why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.
Introducing something variable or unpredictable into public transit would probably deter a few people from using it
From an efficiency perspective this makes sense, but I don’t like it to be honest. The long distance trains do that here and it’s very off putting, although I can understand why - the trains are already usually very overcrowded, long and don’t fit in most stations, no funding is available to extend the platforms any further, and companies can’t buy newer, denser, faster trains because the railway electrify project is decades late…
As an alternative I’d propose increasing the frequency of the trams if possible, or maybe even use longer trams during those times if the stops are suitably long
Great news everyone! Hopefully the system works well and other cities will follow suit. I know in the USA (in the few places we do have public transit) the argument for keeping fares is always 1.we don’t want to pay taxes for that and 2.if we charge that’ll keep the vagrants from using it. Two arguments that make no sense at all, 1. We already pay taxes for the public transit, why pay more to actually use it? And 2.anyone who has used public transit knows the fare doesn’t keep vagrants out.
In the short term, there’s also a lack of capacity. Fares function as a limiter on the number of people using it. Too many people for your capacity? Raise prices. Spare capacity? Lower prices.
This can be solved by increasing capacity, but it takes time to figure out what the capacity necessary actually is and then buying more trains/buses and hiring/training drivers.
My home city of Riga tried to do that after success in Tallinn. The mayor thought of releasing special Riga cards to residents. The issue was that many people come to Riga for work from other cities, towns and villages and they got angry to pay for transport. So mayor said to declare themselves in Riga instead of their home towns. That caused an uproar from town councils as that meant that they will lose all the tax income and won’t be able to provide local services. And Riga is already home to a third of the country’s population, so town budgets are overstretched.
In the end the government had to step in and ban the whole thing. The end.
All in all, car bloat has increased vehicle prices while making autos more destructive to human life, natural ecosystems, and pavement alike. Because the full societal costs of crashes, pollution, and road repairs are not borne by owners of SUVs and trucks, every American is effectively subsidizing car bloat. Even if they drive a sedan. Even if they don’t own a car at all.
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