Fuck cobblestone.
This comment was written by the bicycle gang.
It also sucks for those of us with bad ankles and knees. Almost as bad as sand. All I see on those pictures is pain.
They are also extremely slippery when wet or frozen. So add a lawsuit to the pain as well.
Yeah, looking at one of those is making my ankle hurt.
I’m wondering if they feel as horrible on a fully suspended bike. I’m also commenting something just because.
They maybe feel less horrible, but the vibration screws up your bike.
There are workarounds to get cobblestone streets to work. In Groningen, Netherlands, I’ve seen cozy cobblestone streets which had a 50cm (1½ feet?) wide and very even brick strip in the center for bicycles. Looks and works great and it is an easy retrofit for historic cobblestone.
People make fun of the “new towns” planned and built by post-war socialist governments in the UK, but I spent some delivering leaflets in Stevenage recently and it’s honestly heaven for pedestrians.
There are roads for cars, but they all connect to the back of homes. The front of each house leads into a wide pedestrian / cycle path, and the paths connect via tunnels underneath the roads. I would walk hours each day delivering leaflets and never see a car.
That sounds lovely. Usually “post-war” is associated with car-dependent design, but it’s nice to hear about post-war designs are are good, actually.
If you want people to abandon cars, make the alternatives better. Unfortunately I never see that happening, I only see attempts to make car travel worse. I hate public transport with a passion, because it is so bad. When I was commuting, it took an hour each way to go 13 miles, but if I tried to take public transport, it would have taken two hours each way, including 2 miles of walking on a state highway with no shoulder and no sidewalks. Would have had to take a bus to the light rail, and change trains at least once. This light rail shared the same road that cars use, so it was subject to all of the same traffic issues that cars suffered.
Designing for cars forces alternatives to become worse by physically shoving apart destinations in order to fit in parking lots and more lanes. Nobody wants to walk when they have to traverse shitty parking lots to get anywhere instead of nice places, after all.
The sort of argument you’re making is fundamentally dishonest because it’s based on the presumption that the status quo development pattern is somehow a level playing field when it is, in fact, very much unfairly catering to cars.
See also: The Arrogance of Space
Due to induced demand and other factors, constricting automobile traffic improves public transit and makes getting around by transit and taking a car better in the long run.
Yes, in the short term it would seem negative (30 minutes by car vs. 2hr becomes 1hr vs. 2hr), but more people using transit would spur investment into transit. This would start with better allocation of bus routes to more directly go to desired destinations. In the medium term it would be making other areas easier to use alternatives such as walking and bike paths along state routes like the one you’d take. In the long term it would make good sense to invest in build commuter rail lines into and out of the city, which would be better funded by fares, private and government investment. All of this would reduce traffic from cars in the city as well, without needing to increase the roadway maintenance budget from having bigger roads.
The other thing is that if the light-rail road became pedestrian only, it would have right-of-way through the entire route and wouldn’t have to wait for the cars. Pedestrians wouldn’t block a moving LRV (or they would at their peril).
Walking is slow and you can’t bring stuff with you. Keep the roads, but provide better public transport and tax big pickup trucks and SUVs
Wdym? These streets are driveable, you just have to go slowly and through limited areas
you can’t bring stuff with you.
Pockets, bags, carts. You can take even more stuff walking than on public transit.
They used to be. And then people decided carriages were more convenient than walking. And then people decided cars were more convenient than carriages.
People didn’t really decide, an upper class was able to afford automobiles, they hit tons of people in the streets, they worked together with politicians and automakers to push to make streets for the cars for safety, and invented the term jaywalking. The people who owned cars decided streets belonged to them and through mass production and suburban development, they have become completely normalized.
This legitimately makes it safer for them to coexist, this isn’t some bad thing the lawmakers did just because they had cars. Whether or not you agree with still having cars doesn’t change that that was a good thing.
At the time, many places were considering outright banning cars or at least requiring speed limiters in all cars (to limit to like 25 mph). Car companies knew this would hurt sales, so they started a PR campaign to victim blame pedestrians for pedestrian fatalities. I personally think universal speed limiters set to a quite low speed along with far fewer cars would be far better for safety than modern “rules of the road” + car domination.
The turning point came in 1923, says Norton, when 42,000 Cincinnati residents signed a petition for a ballot initiative that would require all cars to have a governor limiting them to 25 miles per hour. Local auto dealers were terrified, and sprang into action, sending letters to every car owner in the city and taking out advertisements against the measure.
…
Even while passing these laws, however, auto industry groups faced a problem: In Kansas City and elsewhere, no one had followed the rules, and they were rarely enforced by police or judges. To solve it, the industry took up several strategies.
One was an attempt to shape news coverage of car accidents. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce, an industry group, established a free wire service for newspapers: Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians — signaling that following these new laws was important.
Similarly, AAA began sponsoring school safety campaigns and poster contests, crafted around the importance of staying out of the street. Some of the campaigns also ridiculed kids who didn’t follow the rules — in 1925, for instance, hundreds of Detroit school children watched the “trial” of a 12-year-old who’d crossed a street unsafely, and, as Norton writes, a jury of his peers sentenced him to clean chalkboards for a week.
This was also part of the final strategy: shame. In getting pedestrians to follow traffic laws, “the ridicule of their fellow citizens is far more effective than any other means which might be adopted,” said E.B. Lefferts, the head of the Automobile Club of Southern California in the 1920s. Norton likens the resulting campaign to the anti-drug messaging of the '80s and '90s, in which drug use was portrayed as not only dangerous but stupid.
Auto campaigners lobbied police to publicly shame transgressors by whistling or shouting at them — and even carrying women back to the sidewalk — instead of quietly reprimanding or fining them. They staged safety campaigns in which actors dressed in 19th-century garb, or as clowns, were hired to cross the street illegally, signifying that the practice was outdated and foolish. In a 1924 New York safety campaign, a clown was marched in front of a slow-moving Model T and rammed repeatedly.
This strategy also explains the name that was given to crossing illegally on foot: jaywalking. During this era, the word “jay” meant something like “rube” or “hick” — a person from the sticks, who didn’t know how to behave in a city. So pro-auto groups promoted use of the word “jay walker” as someone who didn’t know how to walk in a city, threatening public safety.
So, is the community against all cars? Or just the ones for cities? I went to LA last month to see my brother and we went to this nice area that had blocked the street off permanently and all the restaurants and businesses had taken over the road. I. Fucking. Loved. It. All the extra space was great. So in city life, I completely get it.
That being said… I am a car person. I have an MR2 turbo I love to death. I have a lifted F250 (I grew up on a farm in a small shithole town in SC. I know I’m considered bad here but eh, the Kia Sorento isn’t going to pull the dump trailer or the tractor and the lift is because I’m 8 at heart and still smile driving it around) and a heavily modified Jeep Cherokee I play off-road with. Plus my daily Honda Civic. Cars have souls and driving is a sense of freedom I am addicted to. I can promise you 100% of “grown ups” (age is subjective here) with loud cars isn’t to impress anyone else, it’s for us. I won’t even drive my MR2 at certain times to make sure I don’t disturb anyone and when I’m around a populated area, I shift at low RPM and keep the noise down a lot, but away from everyone in bum fuck rural America, that exhaust note is all for me.
I get you hate cars, I even agree for the most part. But does that mean ALL cars? Am I bad here?
Personal vehicles have a place, and a lot of people really enjoy the hobby of it. But at least what I’m against is how they’ve completely and utterly, fully enveloped our modern Life, paving over the places we have to live in the process. The auto industry has made people addicted to the concept that every place has to be accessable and beholdent to the automobile, making it inaccessible and very unpleasant for anyone who doesn’t buy into that system (pedestrians, disabled people, cyclists etc). It’s honestly a violation of personal freedom that many people can not perform their day-to-day basic functions of socializing, gathering food and working without paying into the micro transactional hell that of the Auto/Oil industry.
Being able to go somewhere and visit worry people without dribble feeding that piggy industry with my hard earned money into gas/electricity is freeing and should be the default. If someone wants to blast down a country road listening to the purr of the engine, power to them. Forcing everyone through deliberately exclusionary infrastructural planning to pilot a few Tons of metal plastic and combustion engines just to perform basic tasks? Fuck off.
(Edit: my bad language is not directed at you, but at the industry, you sound chill)
Nah man, I completely get it. Like I said above, I live in a rural shithole in SC and transportation is like 1/4rd or more of a lot of people’s income. Its easy to say “JuSt bUy SoMeThInG oLdER, yOU DoNt NeEd AnyTHiNg NiCe” but Im a technician at heart and full understand the depth of knowledge you need to properly maintain and repair an old car. If you are super duper lucky, you’ll have an uncle or brother to help you but most people are at the mercy of the shops around them and I personally have been F’d in the A because of ignorance or compliance and I know in some rather silly and not on purpose detail how a vehicle works. Public transportation doesn’t seem to be a possibility in our neck of the woods but doesn’t mean being a slave to car manufacturers is the only solution. I love the freedom, I even drive for a living now and still love it, but I’m not foolish enough to think I am not the outlier.
So everyone should walk everywhere? Not even bikes or scooters?
They are in every place that isn’t America, at least in the city centers
Clearly never been to the Arabian Peninsula
Arabian cities are all artificial and opulent, and probably designed in accordance to American standards.
Okay, but its not only American cities. I think part of it is experiencing population growth simultaneously with wealth at the same time as cars being around
Must have missed them the last time I was in Frankfurt.
![[meme] Pedestrians shouldn't be relegated to the sidelines](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6b416d86-6a93-45bc-9275-c7c1d7a52943.webp){kind=link}