Viewing 10 posts - 81 through 90 (of 90 total)
  • Has anyone actually got a community out of their cars?
  • willard
    Full Member

    I live about 13km from the office and, on the days that I go in (four of the week), I sit in traffic from pretty much the end of my road to work. The journey takes anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes. An hour on a bad day.

    I know that I can cycle that distance and that doing so would be good cardio, but the roads I woudl have to use would make the commute like rolling dice. I just do not see it as a viable option.

    Also, for Cambridge, it is not car free or anywhere close. It’s too expensive for a lot of the people here to buy a house, so the level of commuting is incredible. People _have_ to travel by car unless they rent in town, in which case they can cycle. There are a lot of bikes, but only because there are a lot of people using them. There are still a lot of cars, so it is the worst of both worlds.

    matt_outandabout
    Full Member

    we need a 500m parent car exclusion zone around the school.

    This, this would work in Dunblane, apart from main road past one primary. All four schools would massively benefit – and create safe walking zone for kids.

    cheers_drive
    Full Member

    Unless its poring with rain (car) or icy (walk) I always take my daughter the 1km to nursery by bike. My wife picks her up and always drives, then wonders why she doesn’t lose any weight etc.
    I can understand that many people drop off / pick up as part of the work commute but how many of those work commutes need to be done by car? And even if they would add time to walk or bike I bet they then do go to the gym or do some other exercise ‘to keep fit’ where they could integrate it in to their daily routine.

    Also, for Cambridge, it is not car free or anywhere close. It’s too expensive for a lot of the people here to buy a house, so the level of commuting is incredible. People _have_ to travel by car unless they rent in town, in which case they can cycle. There are a lot of bikes, but only because there are a lot of people using them. There are still a lot of cars, so it is the worst of both worlds.

    My wife’s office is in Cambridge, we’re 15 miles away in Ely, she has to have a car for client visits. The commute can easy take 1.5hours each way at rush hour, ridiculous.

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    MrAgreeable
    Full Member

    This was an interesting watch. It’s basically an attempt to do what the OP described, with some success, although obviously not everyone has the backing of a TV crew and the local council.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09m2djj/fighting-for-air

    Malvern Rider
    Free Member

    They’ve been cycling for years in China.

    I read somewhere* that things are changing, and cycling is in China is becoming ‘looked down upon’ as they rush towards increased car-dependency for shorter journeys.

    *This was a few years ago, so things may be changing yet again.

    The UK is a done deal. Car-culture is now in our DNA. If you don’t use a car you’re an ‘anomaly’. An earlier commenter suggested as they used bicycles their neigbours thought them to be ‘poor’. Snotty neighbours or National norm?

    We humans are every bit as stupid as we are clever.

    bails
    Full Member

    Malvern Rider: there will be people who look at that photo and think that the obvious solution is to add a few more lanes.

    n0b0dy0ftheg0at
    Free Member

    I think the only way most people will change their driving habit for short journeys is taxation… Tax car users for journeys under say 5 miles.

    Perhaps in combination with a tax rebate for those walking; jogging/running; cycling; using public transport.

    While I miss the freedom of day trips in a car, in many ways, I’m so glad our old car became uneconomical ~5 years ago… On a day to day basis, we really did not need it. I can remember having my first car ~20 years ago and using it every day to travel a short journey of ~2 miles, which took ~5 minutes. On a bike it would only take ~10mins and that was going up a short incline!

    IMO we should never have got to a stage where people were allowed to under-use a multi-person motor vehicle for regular personal use, with a driver and many/all passenger seats vacant, bellowing out crazy amounts of air pollution over the last ~50 years since owning a car became a Utopian aspiration.

    UK Life expectancy is now in decline because so many of the population are doing far too little exercise, breathing in the fumes and further burdening our NHS.
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-40608256

    Malvern Rider
    Free Member

    Seems China regretted ‘binning the bike’ almost as soon as they tried it (duh!) – but introducing ‘bike share’ schemes in cities seems to be only partially successful. The streets are still rammed with motor traffic, while mobile-phone payment-addicted pedestrians are taking the easier option of replacing walking with cycling via app-hired bikes and then just dumping the bikes everywhere.

    https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/04/bikeshare-save-biking-in-china/521181/

    Despite having decent bike infrastructure from the 1990s, Wang, who studies urban planning at MIT, thinks the city could do more to make biking inviting. “Most streets will have a 10- or 12-foot-wide bike lane that’s cordoned off from the street, and there are also bike signal lights,” he says. “But that physical infrastructure is in decay and being abused. People will park their car or drive in the bike lanes, so when you talk to people there, they may not be very proud of Beijing—or most cities in China—being a bike city.”

    If there is a lesson there it’s that you can very quickly kill off a culture, and then there’s no going back. One generation later and it’s (almost) all forgotten.

    China proudly embraced its title as the kingdom of bicycles.

    “Owning a bike used to be one of the four treasures,” says David Wang, the founder of Bamboo Bicycle Beijing, a workshop that teaches cyclists to build bikes from bamboo. “It quickly became an everyday kind of vehicle.” That was before Chinese officials essentially waged a war on cycling, declaring it a nuisance that stood in the way of China’s car-centric ambitions.

    Amsterdam was a wildly successful about-turn. But the 70s have gone. Here come the robots. But if all our cars are to become car-share robots, then what about our status symbols? Our sense of freedom? How shall we transport our bicycles to where we wish to ride them? And will they stop for badgers?

    Obviously this is some way off yet (not in many of our lifetimes) so I expect the trend for car-addiction (and that’s what it is – a near-total dependency, a monoculture) to continue apace, hampered only by our plummeting economy and ongoing drop in car sales.

    This could actually reap benefits for health as people eat less and are ‘forced’ to use their legs,whether walking or cycling. I predict that ebike sales will soar and ebike costs will come down.

    Malvern Rider
    Free Member

    UK Life expectancy is now in decline because so many of the population are doing far too little exercise, breathing in the fumes and further burdening our NHS.

    Further dismantling the NHS will solve that problem. You can’t overburden something that is non-existent.

    Once the pesky NHS has all gone away, then we can work on this cyclist nonsense. Once they have gone, we can sort out the roads and return it to the rightful road-users. If things go to plan then 1950 should arrive in about 30 years time. It almost sounds feasible. All we’ll then require will be 20m less people (3.6m are here from the EU, so they might have toddled off by then) to take us back to 30m (1950s figures). A war is always handy for political expedience and the community spirit. Worth considering? Maybe our special relation overseas has something up his sleeve to assist with that? 70 hr working weeks will mean less traffic on the roads as everyone will be indoors most of the time anyway. Looking good, we just need the foresight and commitment to pull together against the common enemies.

    Malvern Rider
    Free Member

    Won’t make a difference, roads will simply be clogged with the same number of self driving cars. Actually more, as they will be driving themselves back to get other pickups instead of spending the day in car parks.

    This makes me think. It hurts!

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