Walkable rule

Deme@sopuli.xyz to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 801 points –
102

Tbh, a walkable city would also make for nice driving because it would alleviate congestion

Honestly at this point I want to live somewhere that’s actively hostile to cars

If you can afford it, downtown Vancouver, BC is hostile to cars.

Parking surcharges (that specifically fund transit), just a few bridges and a couple main roads in and out of downtown.

Downtown eastside you got homeless people that give no shits and will cross the road whenever and block cars.

Downtown westside and all around downtown you have bike lanes, lots of people on bikes and many streets that you can't continue straight unless you are on a bicycle.

Central downtown has a transit mall that only buses, taxis and local deliveries can use.

Most of all you have a Costco that you can get to easier by transit, bike or walking than you can by car.

damn, a walkable Costco is impressive. Even the Costco in Stockholm is car only.

Stockholm has Costco Syndrome

stockholm does legitimately have a reputation for trying to be an american state, they have long been mocked for aping the worst parts of america.

Gotta love the 6 lane highway bulldozed through the middle of a medieval city, and the TWO ring roads. And the conservatives have cancelled the last two rail projects for Stockholm.

the central highway is truly a baffling piece of infrastructure.

So we have this stretch of railway through stockholm that is one of the most heavily trafficked parts of the swedish rail network, it's a massive ugly bottleneck with a measly two tracks.
Let's build a highway right next to it that is TWICE AS WIDE, that sounds like just what the city and nation as a whole needs!

How anyone can look at this and not instantly conclude that the highway bridge should be converted to railway is beyond me.

stockholm has a costco lmao? how do they manage to compete with the existing dollarstore and eko stormarknad?

Yeah, it recently opened like a year or two ago in Täby. I've never been to dollar store, but Ica is basically just a normal supermarket, so I can see how Costco distinguishes itself in that market.

Täby isn't really a nice place to visit if you don't have a car, though. The bike paths are shit, and I've had dickheads in American trucks rev their engines at me when I bike through there. I'd be better of going to Martin och Servera than Costco if I wanted to buy in bulk.

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There's one being built along with (nestled in) 200 units of housing and less than a mile from 4 new buildings of community college housing, connected via foot path and bike trail, in my community, I'm so damn excited.

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"Be the change you want to see in the world."

Yeah fuck any disabled people that depend on their own car.

People with trouble walking, service vehicles, delivery trucks, and such are fine. Literally nobody says they shouldn’t get to drive. They also represent like .001% of city traffic.

People with most disabilities can't have driver license. But they have powered wheelchairs.

That's a couple of bad assumptions right there but let's put aside your narrow conception of what disabled means, you're still OK with fucking over some disabled people.

There are disability adapted bikes that cover a wide range of physical disabilities (I've seen up to even only a single arm and head movements). I'm curious what disabilities would actually require exclusively a car for transportation and for which custom bikes wouldn't be enough, do you know of any ?

Bikes require to keep balance. Powered wheelchairs do not.

is the concept of a trike really that unfathomable to you?

You said bike

you will find that most people use "bicycle" as a general term for basically anything of vaguely that shape and function.

no one (and i use that in the modern sense of "effectively no one", before you um ackshually me on that) says "cargo tricycle", they say "cargo bike" or "bakfiets", and bakfiets just means "cargo/box bike".

There's one in the original picture too lol

Yeah, three-wheeled bikes still count as bikes imo, they're much closer to being bikes than cars.

But I have nothing against powered wheelchair obviously, they aren't cars.

Everyone who does not have two good eyes, two arms and at least one leg can't legaly obtain driver's licese. Meanwhile powered wheelchair does not have such restrictions. Even person with one working muscle can drive powered wheelchair.

That's a subset of disabled people & people without the use of legs or a arm can drive they just need a vehicle with special controls.powered wheelchairs don't fulfill all travel needs.

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adds twelve lanes to my stroad

One guy needs to move from the far left entrance-lane to the far right exit-lane

Causes a sixteen car pileup

Traffic clogged for miles

This happens a minimum of three days a week

Guys, cars are just more convenient, you just don't understand how to take civil engineering seriously.

You have entrance lanes on the left‽ 😳

Highways are fucking bananas, man. You should check out I-35 through downtown Austin. The designer put these big flying shoulders over the main lane, and it precipitated so many wrecks that the architect of the project killed himself.

I'm now reading that the architect suicide is an urban legend.

Can you show me some coordinates of the worst places there? I'm trying to find the place this redditor talks about, but I can't find the entrance to the highway on StreetView. 26th isn't even connected to the highway, so I presume they meant that they started driving from there.

But yeah, this highway looks horrible.

You can see this in the netherlands. Barely any cars on the road compared to germany. I sometimes need to deliver items there for work and it's so much nicer to drive there. Also you are always punctual because traffic is so predictable.

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needs more trees

Seriously! It's currently 100 degrees in my city. Walking down the neighborhood blocks with tree coverage makes such a difference.

100 degrees in my city.

It's boiling hot. Literally. How?

*checks soviet citybuilding books* Yep, more trees.

Good public transportation, bike lanes, and all with walkability in mind, I wish

if your in the states chicago has that. City is on a grid system and up to two transfers between bus and trains are free not to mention the fare itself is very reasonable https://www.transitchicago.com/fares/ also bike lanes abound now. You would be hard pressed to find a major street without at least the lines and most expansion now is about protected lanes.

This is quite literally what a large stretch of the Ohlone Greenway looks like from Richmond through El Cerrito, Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, down to Oakland looks like.

Pepe is dead. His creator killed him because of all the far right memes he was used in.

Just stop.

i did not know walkable cities was a far right movement. wow. you learn something new everyday i guess

walkable cities are not a far right movement.

you just said it was. because of Pepe. are u messing with me?

No no u dont understand. Once the bad people have used a meme, the good people aren't allowed to use it anymore!

I know you're being sarcastic, but I just absolutely despise that mentality. People seriously think that it's best to just roll over to the side and surrender every symbol the nazis want for themselves?

Yes I was being sarcastic, and I agree with you 100%. The problem is that they start using these symbols and memes as a kind of dog whistle and then people catch on and anyone using them is immediately sus. We're not just rolling over and letting them take them, they are taking them by force.

that concept is effectively just the heckler's veto, and indeed it fucking sucks.

If we let people continously ruin words and symbols such that we stop using them, they get to decide what words and symbols we use, and have a tool to shape discourse to their favour.

As a swede, i do not much like the idea of going "welp, nazis used viking imagery, we have to ban runes now", i don't want nazis to be able to merrily wipe out the last traces of our past culture.

Semiotics is such a fascinating study. The true power of language is astonishing, and I don't mean marketing. We live our lives in language. LLM's are going to change the relationship between the planes of content and expression so much that we're forced back to first principles. It's a bit surreal understanding this, and watching everyone argue over jobs and copyright.

this sounds a lot like nonsense techbro talk

it's not like made up text is anything new, people have been running misinformation and propaganda campaigns for years and years, just using worse technology and more manual intervention. The only real difference is that it can be basically wholly automated at this point, which isn't nothing but i profoundly doubt it'll be some massive revolution.

Not to be a dick, but just because you don't understand it doesn't make it nonsense. I was well into semiotics before "tech bro" was a thing people say. Did you have a question?

They did do a number on the swastika, in fairness.

Ok sure, but hindus still don't let that bother them.

Man the whole "pepe is right wing" thing was huge like 4 years ago, now I literally only ever see it mentioned by people like you. It's a drawing of a frog, if you don't like it then hide the post.

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

i really wish my city had a lot of bike lanes

Well, I can tell you as someone who lives in one that does: cops and other assholes park all over the bike lanes constantly, and idiots walk all over it without looking. So…I’m all for them. But we have to eliminate cops and cars and other idiocy for them to workike they should.

You can read all about it in my upcoming NYT bestseller, Cops and Other Idiots: A Biker’s Guide to Pretending You Didn’t Mean To Run Over That Cop (And Those Other Assholes!)

you wish your city had a lot of bike PATHS, it drives me mad that everyone keeps using the term "bike lane" because that very specifically means just painting a line on the road which is TERRIBLE.

If every bike lane was replaced with a wide sidewalk for both bicycles and pedestrians america would actually be a halfway okay place to live in, that's the standard here in sweden and while it's obviously not optimal, it means you can reliably bike just about everywhere and people with wheelchairs or mobility scooters don't have to worry about having infrastructure available to safely get around.

i had no idea bike path and lane meant different things, i had bike paths in mind when i wrote that

it's really frustrating that youtubers who talk about urbanism especially in places like north america don't talk more about this distinction, i think it does a pretty significant amount of harm that people never get to learn the proper terms for these things.

Like, imagine getting into this stuff and you merrily contact local politicians and talk about how bike lanes would help cyclists and help the city, if that goes through you might think you're going to see massive improvements and then you're given a slap to the face when you see that they just.. draw a line of paint on the roads..

Another thing that rather annoys me but it nowhere near as bad, is the insistence on separated single-direction road-level bike paths, often with shitty separation from traffic.
I think it would be more effective to campaign for simple wide multi-use paths, especially where there are already sidewalks you can just make those 3x as wide and paint a line at the edge of the old sidewalk, and suddenly you have something that lets EVERYONE get around safely and comfortably, even people in wheelchairs and large bulky mobility scooters, and it's much easier to maintain than narrow bike paths with obstacles on either side.

But obviously i'm biased because that's how it generally works here, however it works really well for establishing a baseline level of accessibility and cementing in people's minds that living without a car is perfectly doable even if it's not necessarily convenient yet.

Like, imagine getting into this stuff and you merrily contact local politicians and talk about how bike lanes would help cyclists and help the city, if that goes through you might think you're going to see massive improvements and then you're given a slap to the face when you see that they just.. draw a line of paint on the roads..

And in the US, it's even more malicious than that in reality. That painted line on the side of the road with a picture of a bike that the city says is for bicyclists? Yeah, people will still park their cars on it. And also now that you have a "bike lane" that you're supposed to use, the city makes it a crime to ride bikes in pedestrian spaces.

So you, as a bicyclist, are riding along the road and see that someone parked their truck in the bike lane. You have two options: ride into the same lane as motor vehicle traffic and pray you don't become one of the roughly 120 bicyclists injured or 3 bicyclists killed by cars in the US each and every day, or you switch to the sidewalk and live another day. You play it safe, choose the sidewalk (since there aren't many pedestrians anyways either) but oh no! There's a cop, they stop you and issue a fine. And if you ask why they haven't ticketed the pickup truck for parking in the bike lane, they say it's a matter of police discretion.

I really wish my city had no Sobyanin and my country had no Putin. Bike lanes are better alternatives to those two things.

I bet the Dutch would reward anyone who delivered Putin to the Hauge with some bike lanes wherever they want.

Yay! "National treasure" is finally worth something!

Even if we don't end up winning the Euro football championship, 🇳🇱 is the walkability winner.

I recently came across this enthusiastic in-depth analysis of a completely unknown and (to us) normal train station somewhere in the province. No sports event will ever make me feel as patriotic as this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HACaRm2KP6Q

This is fantastic. Utterly fantastic. Why can't we all have this stuff? Honestly, I feel like the modern vikings taking over the UK would be great.

We've done it before..

Though the Angles and Saxons get all the credit, there's a lot of Frisian heritage there too.

the nordics win walkability because we just do not give a fuck and will walk anywhere, i have seen parents with a baby in a stroller going for a walk in the middle of nowhere with cars whizzing past at 60 km/h

"walkable city" image includes 15 people and only 2 are walking

Using skateboards, scooters and wheelchairs counts as walking

This is what I dream of for my city and I drive for a living. Get these 70 square feet of individual morons who don't need to be on the road out of my way.

Given that you drive for living, you probably drive truck or bus or taxi. Makes sense. Using huge steel brick to transport 1.2 people on average is such idiocy.

4chan for walkability