City roads should be ‘ripped out completely’ to fight pollution, says government adviser
City roads should be ‘ripped out completely’ to fight pollution, says government adviser
ITT: trolls seizing upon a clickbait headline and out-of-context quote in order to make blatantly delusional strawman arguments.
It's literally two idiots contorting into ludicrous shapes just to stay mad about this. It's wild.
WHAT ABOUT THE TRUCKS???? I am going to quote one clause of the article over and over to prove I didn't read it and get mad at people who suggest that anything could change in any way, ever! Trucks are part of human DNA and the moment an 18 wheeler can't smog up your back yard is when we have all lost our freedumb!!!
People not realising the Telegraph is one step up from shitty xenophobic racist shitrags like The S*n
Ok, then why was an article from this source even posted to this community in the first place, and why is it popular enough to be at the top of the community right now?
If it's such a bad article and source and does not represent the values of this community, shouldn't it have a lot more down votes? And also fewer community members defending the content of the article?
Yeah, I'm sure the quote is completely out of context and the guy who's also
called for people to limit the use of “personal care products”, “computers” and “printers” in their homes which he said were contributing to pollution.
isn't just one of those "back-to-monkee, comfort is unnecessary" types.
Also ITT: a lot of people who didn't actually read the article and are instead making arguments based on their feelings.
Story of humanity.
I mean... it's not a particularly in-depth article. Do you have a better source with more context for Dr. Fuller's comments?
The burden of providing better context is on the people who support this point of view, not on the people criticizing what the article says.
Gentle reminder: This site is basically a tabloid at this point and should not be used as a serious source. If you have to, at least use an archived version.
I can't read the article (paywall), but it seems to me that there might be a distinction between road and street that some people in this thread don't know about.
I'll quote the main bit, standard problems and he's not wrong about the solutions. Why should London residents put up with rich out of London drivers polluting where they live? There is a tube and train already. Cutting down the number of routes for through traffic and turning the old roads into parks would be great. And exactly what is already happening in places with ltns
"He cited a north London councillor who described traffic as an “invasive species” that “swamps all other types of transport”. Up to 80 per cent of people living on arterial routes in urban areas did not own cars, with most of the pollution being caused by motorists driving into and through their communities.
Pointing to the “greening” of city centres such as Seoul and Utrecht, he said: “We should start changing our cities and actually start thinking about ripping out road infrastructure and turning them into green spaces or green transport corridors. We have to look beyond traffic.”
This needed to be combined with a drive to get people out of their cars and into walking, cycling and using public transport, which would not only help tackle climate change but also improve health and so reduce pressures on the NHS."
Not a horrible idea if you have solid, simple, and actionable plans to replace them with robust, simple, and effective public transport options. Otherwise… yeah, a bit too far.
Uh huh, and what about material delivery to stores, restaurants, &etc in the city? What about postal service?
We should absolutely invest more in public transit, but light rail and buses are not logistics solutions.
Nimby crash course, vocabulary edition!
Roads in the 21st century incarnation of English almost always refer specifically to car infrastructure.
Streets are not the same as roads, it describes the space between two rows of properties. Modern streets typically contain a road for cars, but also sidewalks, trees, gardens, lounge spaces, etc. There's a reason it's called street food and not road food, because they're selling on the streets and not in the middle of the roads where they'll get run over.
Every time something like this gets brought up, you always get Nimbys screeching how this will evict everyone from their homes or whatever, and I think it's because they think removing roads means also removing the streets themselves, when in reality it means the streets get restored and become much more welcoming and people friendly.
Wow, post is getting a lot of traction. Wish some of the actual actionable ones had the same level of activity
At this point, I'd settle for taking the 2-lane road segments in my town that turn into 4-lane nightmares and then merge back into 2-lane streets a dozen blocks later with bike lanes and parking, and getting rid of the 4-lane parts that often don't have sidewalks or bike infra.
Sure, these road segments funnel traffic away from the more-residential city grid streets, but they're also rife with speeding and they make it hard to navigate on a bike unless you happen to know which streets have any sort of infra
Eh, keep some for emergency & delivery vehicles, public transport and bicycles.
They don't actually rip up roads but just put retractable bollards there that are lowered for emergency vehicles and cargo delivery with a permit.
They do rip up roads, just not quite literally all of them. You'll always have at least one lane, depending on the location. But the rest, including parking spaces, can be replaced with something else like greenspaces instead.
I think the ideal is an alternating block structure
Pedestrian Street,
Road,
Pedestrian Street,
Transit only Lane,
Pedestrian Street,
Road,
Pedestrian Street,
Transit Only Lane,
...
Where Pedestrian streets cross roads, have car traffic enter a roundabout sunk below the pedestrian path, when they cross transit lanes, have a gate bridge that closes off the lane whenever a tram or bus isn't near the crossing, same deal when car traffic crosses a tram or bus lane
Voila, maximum restriction of cross interaction between three separate modes of transport, a full 75% of which is dedicated to pedestrian and transit use, and the last quarter there mostly just for the benefit of last mile package delivery and emergency services, as well as the odd profession that legit has to use automobile transport for whatever reason.
Where do bikes fit in your overall design?
On pedestrian streets like in Amsterdam, apparently they're less aggro when they aren't sharing the road with 2 ton death machines
@PhlubbaDubba @throwslemy I think it's very sad that you think that "road" is synonymous with cars.
I mean it literally is, like the highway regulators literally use it as a byword for "car only lane"
Pothole's Paradise like in parts of Africa
Could have just said LA, kinda weird to just choose the continent of Africa.
I don't know about "La" what is it ?
I do know parts of Africa are like that.
I don't know about all continents but I do know there are mostly good roads in many other continents (Europe, parts of Asia ...)
I wonder how he thinks how supermarket shelves or the storage of his favorite restaurants are filled. He might be in for a surprise when no trucks will be delivering anything in the city. Or does he believe his local Tesco is getting it's wares by tube?
It's not clear from the way the article quotes him exactly what he said should be "ripped out completely". You seem to be interpreting it as "all city roads should be ripped out completely".
I suspect he's saying we could rip out many city roads, completely turning them into green spaces and with forms of more active transport. I don't think this is saying remove all roads to the extent goods vehicles can't enter.
To take this to its logical conclusion, once the streets are gone, there is no need for buildings anymore, so they can tear those all down and plant a forest. But then you wonder where you are going to put all the people who used to live and work there.
On a train, bus, bike, and foot. Odd, it's like cities existed for 4 millennia without cars.
Who said anything about streets? The article only mentions removing roads, which makes sense to me
Average muskbrain energy here.
Have fun keeping up economic output.
Fuck economic output, I want to be happy and healthy and live in a world that I'd actually want kids to grow up in.
I want to be happy and healthy
This is dependent on the economic output that you consider expendable.
For instance, there will be no modern medicine without microchip fabrication, and really the entire global electronics industry from top to bottom. Without that extraordinarily complex production system woven through our economy, you're basically back to 1940s medicine.
Nothing says abject stupidity like taking an argument to its extremes no matter the cost.
Tearing out extra lanes that do nothing but encourage more traffic, adding protected cycling lanes or reducing road speed are seen as extreme by those that made the decisions that have created the infrastructure we have. In reality these are compromises.
'Share the road' is not a compromise. Sharrows are not a compromise. Jaywalking laws are not a compromise. Victim blaming is not a compromise. Media dehumanising pedestrians is not a compromise.Nobody ever fucking considered anything else but cars, drivers and the car lobby when installing these things.
Now tearing it out city centers to focus on humans and humanity is extreme?
Yes, you're right: the conservative media outlet blatantly spinning the quote is being abjectly stupid.
Well, you sure know what you're talking about, you-need-to-allow-white-pride... 🙃
Taken out of context. I also said that you-need-to-allow-black-pride...
But you keep taking the Redditor approach to things, sifting through peoples history to attack things they said out of context, instead of actually making a meaningful attempt at a discussion. It's BOUND to make lemmy a replica of the place you fled from.
So what did we do before we had widespread cargo trucking? Did we just not deliver any cargo ever? Everyone just wandered around dropping limes all over the place 'cause they'd only figured out how to carry them with their bare hands, until Henry Ford invented gas station sushi and revolutionized transportation forever?
Well, in the interest of not wasting everybody's time, I'll tell you: they organized their towns and cities around rail. This happened right here in the United States, with the stated example being in Philadelphia. Even the old West Coast cities were organized in much the same way for a long time. That was the only way they had available to them, and somehow, they still managed to have an economy.
We have a lot of retrofitting to do to regain that ideal. But it's possible.
Trucks were invented in 1890s. By 1900 the world's population was 1.6 billion, 5 times smaller than it is now.
But population numbers aren't the only thing that has changed since then.
A hundred some years ago FDA didn't exist. You could buy eggs, meat, etc. from your local farmers and butchers. Now, you need licenses and to comply with a whole bunch of different codes. Fewer people can comply with those, so the average distance things need to be shipped has increased.
There's, also, a lot more things nowadays that were never possible to produce locally (or even just close by) to begin with. Semiconductors, medications, even fine fabrics for clothing require fairly complex processes and logistics. You can't just plop a fab or a lab in every large-ish city - that is going to be even more of a nightmare to supply with resources necessary to keep it running, than shipping final product from somewhere else far away.
So what did we do before we had widespread cargo trucking?
Agrarian society - wagons and hand carts.
they organized their towns and cities around rail
Towns and cities were significantly smaller and less complex. Rail does not scale. Adding new rail spurs is prohibitively time-consuming and inflexible.
Seriously, how would you propose to handle citywide garbage/recycling collection with light rail and no motorized vehicles? (Just for instance).
Just to offer one possible alternative: cargo bikes/trikes are a thing.
Are you fucking kidding me? Have you ever had to transport anything jeavor or large in real life?
Oh great, how many cargo bikes would we need to carry a pallet of milk cartons to the local grocery store? How many would we need to replace one truckload?
Doesn't matter because you also need a refrigeration system to keep the milk from spoiling. Good luck putting that on a bike.
Who besides rich boys can afford to ride their bikes to work?
Single mothers getting their kids to elementary and middle schools?
The elderly going to their doctors appointments?
Working stiffs who can’t afford to live in downtown?
What do you think will happen to rents when is forced to get an apartment in one of the existing blocks?
Ah, yes. Rich people and their... checks notes Bicycles..? lol
You seem to be under the impression that a bicycle is more expensive to buy and run than a car. I'd love to see your working for this.
Renting a home close enough to your workplace to make biking every day practical is usually more expensive than owning a car and living further away - especially if you have a family and need more than a studio apartment. In that sense, owning a bicycle and not a car is more expensive.
That said, this could be fixed with better public transit.
The average US commute is about 30 minutes.
That distance on bike in a city is about 10 2.5 hours.
In a city you can go about 5 miles in 30 minutes on a bike
I live in a city with an MSA of, let’s call it 2 million people.
What is it going to cost to cram 2 million people into a 5 mile circle and not have roads to bring in food?
Who besides rich boys can afford to ride their bikes to work?
i bike to work in no small part because i can't afford to drive there
Single mothers getting their kids to elementary and middle schools?
in civilized countries, they can use a cargo bike (what the dutch call a bakfiets) to carry the kids. or the kids can ride their own bikes.
The elderly going to their doctors appointments?
many elderly people can still cycle. you may even see electric assist tricycles on the bike path in civilized countries. and of course elderly people also benefit from accessible and convenient public transit.
Working stiffs who can’t afford to live in downtown?
this is a real concern and i absolutely share your desire to build large-scale dense public housing developments in downtown around transit stations, as well as doing the same around more outlying transit stations such that taking public transit also becomes a viable option.
What do you think will happen to rents when is forced to get an apartment in one of the existing blocks?
wait, i thought you wanted to build public housing to address housing affordability? was that just me offering a solution, and not you? that's weird
That is not a solution, it is a communist fantasy.
How are you supposed to have busses without roads?
So all we have to do is get rid of rent and make everyone live in government housing,
Magically levitate supplies into the stores,
Get my 90 year old parents and people with sick infants to bike in to the doctors in the snow and rain,
So these lawyers on their $2,000 carbon fiber Trek bicycles can win their argument at city hall.
Car brains are out in force for this thread, lol.
Apparently, if you can't transit products by car or truck, directly to the front-door of every business, the city will collapse.
That there are cities that have actually done this doesn't seem to stop them insisting it's impossible.
Something I think is sort of ironic is that in my neighborhood most of the last mile delivery happens on bike. This isn't because of a lack of automobile infrastructure but because there are too many automobiles. Nowhere to park or even idle the van for a short time.
I do also suspect it's more convenient for the delivery person to hop off a bike at each stop than it would be to park a car and get out etc.
If I were a city planner I'd integrate that system into my strategy. Ripping out every road is of course hyperbole and clickbait, but ripping out every other road seems like a no brainer. But I seriously doubt converting 3/4 or more of the roads for autos into pedestrian/bike/tram/greenspace would shake things up too bad. Just make sure to keep main arteries open for automobiles and ensure there's centralized parking garages (street parking is a blight) within a decent walking distance and I think people who need to have a car in the city will get used to it fast.
Name five, with populations higher than 50,000.
Fuck_cars on Lemmy is great, I feel like I'm really fighting for the future every time I come here.
On Reddit it was just people trying to out meme each other
Lol
These people also forget that "delivery trucks allowed" is common. Cutting out 95% of cars and leaving delivery vehicles is fine.
I worry more about emergency services access...
Emergency services have a lot of problems delivering care in current city traffic.
What is your proposed alternative solution for logistics in any moderately dense urban area? Like never mind New York, you couldn't make this work in Little Rock.
Why don't you read the article? It's all spelled out right there.
Currently, no. But with mixed zoning, it would become more amenable to change over time.