> I'd love to drive to a city centre and then have a walk without the traffic noise
There's a huge inherent contradiction here though: You are creating the very problem you want to escape from for everyone along your path of travel. land tends to be quite expensive in the city center, and parking is not a good use of it. Are you willing to spend $50 to park your car there to drive to the city center?
>Are you willing to spend $50 to park your car there to drive to the city center?
That's pretty common for people who drive into big cities for the day (or indeed to work for a day). Maybe they park on the outskirts and take transit in. But that takes time and, especially for a family, the savings may not really be worth it.
Yeah, that's why I chose that figure; it's roughly what it costs to park for a day here in Manhattan. And that's before the bridge and interstate tolls, if you're coming from the west.
To most people it isn't worth it to spend that much, especially because traffic on the bridges and tunnels is usually so bad that the trains are not only cheaper but faster, too.
Kinda agree but thats a model that works for many places that switched to car free centre. In many cases parking lots already exist in outskirts of the centre.
Completely car free city is a pipe dream. Diversity is good.
The mere presence of cars actively hurts walkability and increases the risk of accidents for pedestrians and cyclists.
Cars need special roadways with expensive construction methods, maintenance, signaling and provisions for parking their bulk.
This takes up huge amounts of space that could have been used for waking streets, bike paths and attentive urban spaces, instead of large expanses of boring black asphalt.
Ask a shop owner whether she would rather have thousands of people in cars driving by her store and not even look at it, or hundreds of pedestrians who stop and look at her display windows.
Ask a cafe owner whether he would prefer to have his outside seating right next to a major thoroughfare, or on a busy walking street.
Cars actively make environments hostile and uninviting to people.
I am talking about the general metro area, not just the city centre.
In a lot of cases (at least here) the shops were there first, and the thoroughfare grew in use next to them. This road cuts directly throuhh the middle of the entire city.
Specifically a stream that had decent walkable paths alongside was put underground and a big thoroughfare put on top of it. I'm part of an initiative to reopen the stream and put the traffic in a tunnel underneath, in order to create a park/urban space for people, rather than cars.
I want the entire city to be pedestrian first, bicycles second and cars dead last.
In my nearest city quite a lot of the problem is traffic travelling via the centre. If someone wants to go West to East they will travel through the centre rather than around the outside.
What you really need is a shift so the closer to the centre you get the more you are forced out of the car and onto public transport and ultimately cycling or walking. Cars should be for when you want to leave towards the highway.
There's a huge inherent contradiction here though: You are creating the very problem you want to escape from for everyone along your path of travel. land tends to be quite expensive in the city center, and parking is not a good use of it. Are you willing to spend $50 to park your car there to drive to the city center?