Where do bikes fit in your overall design?

You mean mixing businesses and residential units in the same walkable neighborhood like we’ve done for thousands of years? That would never work! We must maximize commuting distances in order to reduce traffic and commuting times.

Nobody designed them the way they are, at least not with a grand design in mind. Traffic is shaped by planning for existing demand

That is not how it works, at all. They model future demand and they do make executive decisions to shape traffic in the way they want it to be, not just the way it is today.

as long as you don’t have a credible idea why millions of people should give up their homes to live in overpriced shoe boxes without a bit of green and quiet in the city, this will get you nowhere

That is happening because:

• The rest of us are subsidizing their lifestyle through our taxes. North American suburbs don’t pay enough to cover their own infrastructure.
• They do not experience the externalities of their lifestyle. It is us living in denser areas that suffer from the increased motor vehicle traffic that suburbanites produce.
• Ever increasing car traffic has led to widening roads and culling of trees. Eliminate car lanes and plant trees, I say.
• Cities aren’t loud, cars are loud. Reduce car traffic and our streets won’t be noisy.

People love living in spaceous houses they own.

They don’t love it so much when they have to pay for the cost of the infrastructure needed to support them. Stop subsidizing suburbs and suddenly people will be much more accepting of more modest accommodations, like most of us do.

Remember that those urban centers would and could simply not exist without people from the outskirts working and shopping in those urban centers.

Plainly false, as those suburbanites could simply move closer to where they work, if only zoning laws permitted them to do so, which is not the case in most of North America.

Again, and it is a point that no amount of mental yoga can get around: what we want is something that already happens in plenty of towns around Europe and Japan that existed before the advent of the car. It is not unrealistic, it is the historical norm.

I spent a couple of decades living in Spain. I’m well familiar with old towns.

Designing our streets for pedestrians first, transit/bikes next and private motor vehicles last is the way it should be. If that means that some streets are inconvenient for car traffic, so be it. Surely that is preferable to downgrading the ability of the most vulnerable to move around, or the quality of that experience.

North-american style car-dependent suburbs are an aberration that should disappear altogether. They didn’t exist a hundred years ago and they shouldn’t exist now. It is immoral that the people living sustainably in urban centers are subsidizing the people living at large in the suburbs. If they like them so much they can pay their true cost to society.

I just made it clear that making personal cars somehow “vanish” will not really change the financial side of things.

What you are not taking into account is that the sort of low-density, car-dependent, single family home suburbia we criticise requires many more square meters of road per person than a walkable medium-density mixed-use neighborhood. Strongtowns shows with data, not opinion, how town centers are subsidizing financially unsustainable car-dependent suburbia.

I wish anyone in this “FuckCars” community would actually think of a way to fix the world, and not just complain about the way it is.

Easy. Start by copying the Dutch street design guidelines and zoning laws. Boom! Living car-free or car-lite would be much easier, at least in North America where so many people drive to do the most basic daily errands.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just study and copy what already works elsewhere. That’s how bad things are around here.

Please stop being disingenuous. You know perfectly well that what we want is doable because it is already being done in many places in Europe and Japan. Stop fighting a strawman of your own creation.

We want fewer private motor vehicles in our streets because car-centric urban planning translates into places that are unpleasant to live in, especially for people who don’t drive.

I live right by a busy stroad. How many of the cars whizzing by do you think are delivery vehicles? How many busses? Very few compared to the number obese SUVs and lifted pickups, even though there are four large supermarkets and many shops within walking distance along this corridor.

If we reduced the number of private motor vehicles in this stroad the quality of life for my family would significantly increase: less air pollution, less traffic noise, more pleasant daily errands, less risk of being run over by a tank-sized ego booster, more room for trees and bicycles.

Stop spewing bullshit and fear. Let my kids and I hope for a better future.

Until people develop a workable alternative

The alternative will not appear out of thin air. More people need to have a sense of the long-reaching consequences of car-dependent urban planning and that’s what propels them to vote for better planning in their cities.

Nothing is going to change without a shift in political leanings, and that’s what this sort of advocacy is doing.

the dockless rent-a-scooters need to go

Yeah, I get it. Private vehicles everywhere on the side of the street are an eyesore and take a ton of valuable public space. If at least e-scooters were as small as a car it wouldn’t be such a big deal to see them parked everywhere.

Plus, some people have kids under 5

Yup, that’s us. We walk, use transit, or the kid rides on her bike child seat.

E-bikes exist if you don’t have the legs to tackle those hills yet.

I wish i could also move more people with me on the bicycle

Depending on the size of those people: bike child seat, bike trailer, or they can ride their own bicycle. Cargo bikes can easily carry two kids or one adult without even using a trailer.

It would also be great if there was some sort of heater/AC in it as well

That is called “dress for the weather”. Even snowflake pinko commies like me can do it.

I rode in all weather for years

Same. And that includes snow and ice, for those at the back that think that riding a bike in winter is only possible in LA. If people can walk in that weather, people can ride a bike even more easily as the exercise keeps you warmer.

That is a good point. If they are not in a car, they must be either poor or stupid, which means they don’t really deserve the same rights as regular people (i.e. drivers).

Riding a bike doesn’t necessarily mean owning a bike.

Places like Toronto or London have bicycle sharing programs where for a small monthly fee you can go to one of many stations around the city, pick a bike and leave it at any of the stations near to your destination. The maintenance staff ensures that all stations have some bikes available and that the bikes remain in working condition.

Vehicle safety needs to expand to the other side of the windshield.

I would take it further and day that regulations should prioritize the safety of the people outside the vehicle over the people inside, for the simple reason that the people buying the vehicle already have a strong incentive to maximize their own safety, while they currently have zero concerns about the safety of pedestrians.

Pedestrians, on the other hand, don’t have the freedom to choose which vehicle runs them over, so it is up to regulations to advocate for them because nobody else will.

Whatever is most pleasant/convenient for the trip I’m trying to make, as long as it is not a car, because cars are disproportionately noisy, polluting and a danger to my neighbors, and I don’t want to contribute to that.

If all the options were equally available and convenient, then for me walking > cycling > streetcar > train > bus.

How about: change zoning laws to allow people to collectively decide what sort of housing they would like, and connect those places through complete streets that cater to multiple forms of transportation. Instead of the current suburban cookie-cutter approach of single family homes and car dependence.

Some people don’t drive at all. And some never have.

Guess what, if you banned all personal cars from a city while retaining access for trucks (as no city would survive without them), the road damage would not be reduced in any noticable manner

The majority of the fuck cars crowd doesn’t want to ban all personal motor vehicles. We want our streets to be pleasant to live and walk around, and car-centric urban planning is incompatible with that.

As for the deliveries of commercial goods, you only need to look at how it is achieved today in cities that are designed around people instead of cars. If you live in North America you may be picturing your shopping as a weekend highway trip to a big box store with a massive ground-level parking. Such large stores practically require large semi trucks to bring goods in.

A different way of doing things is possible, and indeed not only it was done that better way in North America before the popularity of the car, but is still done that way in most places around the world.

Instead of hopping in your car once a week, you walk or use other means of transportation on your way home from work. Yes, walking is fine because your destination isn’t far away any more: mixed-use buildings mean that you live not far from where you shop. Shops are smaller and they are not surrounded by an ugly sea of car parking – it isn’t needed when people arrive to the shop by foot.

“But what about bringing goods into the shop?”, you say. “Don’t you need trucks for that?”. Yes, small ones, not semi trucks. Remember: it is not a huge big box store by the highway. It’s a neighborhood grocery shop, or furniture shop, or whatever else it is that you are buying.

Small delivery vans and trucks are all that is required. And often times, they are only allowed to deliver within certain hours of the day to reduce the amount of disturbance to the neighbors, who want to enjoy their streets with as little motor vehicle traffic as possible.

This isn’t some new experimental idea. It’s how it already works in most of the developed world.

People biking at scramble intersections do not ride at 30Kph. Acting in good faith helps maintaining a friendly discussion.

I have a foolproof solution for that. It involves not killing.

Sorry, I had to. You make a valid point.