Generic car focussed housing development. The future is 15 minutes away and it’s high time we get there. With the climate crisis in full swing we need to rethink unsustainable lifestyles and restructure unsustainable urban design into sustainable living. The concept of the 15 minutes city has gained popularity and
Continue readingTag: car
Things Are Good: Tokyo Demonstrates the True Cost of Cars
Japan’s well respected car industry sells cars the world over, but at home it’s a different story. Car ownership is low in Japan for obvious reasons like having a good public transit system and high speed trains for intercity travel. In the capital city of Tokyo car ownership is amongst
Continue readingThings Are Good: France: Parking Lots Must Have Solar Panels
Drivers know all too well that parking lots are hot, uncomfortable, and are never the right size. In France larger parking lots will now require shading in the form of solar panels, making the large swaths of asphalt a little more comfortable. The solar panels are projected to provide the
Continue readingThings Are Good: E-Bikes Replacing Cars at Increasing Rate
It’s clear to anyone who has to buy a car because they live in low-density suburban communities that cars are expensive and kill the environment (and people). This awareness of the dangers of the automobile is growing and people are turning to e-bikes. Anecdotally we see places which have encouraged
Continue readingThings Are Good: France Pays People to Stop Driving and Start Riding
Car drivers take up way more road space than they need since the size of their vehicles are disproportionate to their usefulness. Smart countries aim to limit the number of single occupant vehicles on the road for this reason and to ensure that all people can easily get from one
Continue readingThings Are Good: This Parking Space Technique Holds 10 Times More Vehicles
There’s a fiction that cars are needed in cities and we should provide parts of our limited land in urban centres so one person can leave their car. This fiction perpetuated by car brains hurts our cities and is really not good, to solve this problem the city of Rotterdam
Continue readingThings Are Good: The Transformation of Paris from Traffic Jams to Quick Movement
Paris once had a reputation for horrible traffic, long queues of cars and taxing journeys via cars. When you have a problem stemming from one element sometimes it’s best to just get rid of it. That’s exactly what Paris is doing. By getting rid of the car traffic jams are
Continue readingThings Are Good: Driving Kills the Planet, Here’s How to End the Obsession with Cars
Smoking is bad for your health, yet people still smoke. Driving is bad for your health, yet people still drive. Over the last half century we’ve worked hard to help people quit smoking and deter people from engaging in the behaviour in the first place. It’s time we help people
Continue readingThings Are Good: It’s Time to Destroy Highways to Build Cities
People make cities an interesting place to be. It’s the people that produce culture and economic prosperity, yet many cities have highways going right through them. These highways make the city worse in every regard. Now, cities in America will be getting funding to repair the cities from the damage
Continue readingThings Are Good: Ending the Gender Gap in Transportation
There is a gender gap in our cities and it’s all thanks to car-centric design. Everybody knows that cars destroy urban centers and cause a lot of harm to public health. but you may not have thought of the impact cars have on gender. As cities look to modernize themselves
Continue readingThings Are Good: Removing Highways Improves Cities
Urban highways occupy a lot of space that can otherwise be used for parks, housing, offices, or anything else that produces economic benefits. The post war highway building boom in North America destroyed communities (in the USA highways were built to purposefully isolate black communities), fuelled car-dependent suburban developments, and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cities can Easily Reducing Salt Wasted on Roads
Transportation systems that put cars front and centre cause a lot of damage, we know this. But aspects of our cultural approach to getting around like, the reliance on road salt, are easily ignored. Every winter in North America we dump an unfathomable amount of salt on our roads which
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Pandemic Life is Changing Transportation for the Better
Traffic is the worst and when people start to regularly work from offices we are bound to see an abundance of traffic. Nobody wants this, yet for the last century we’ve been building our cities and suburbs to cause traffic instead of alleviating it. This past year as the need
Continue readingmark a rayner: It Came from Plan B
A few years ago I had an epiphany about one of my life choices. I was a guest on my buddy Keith’s excellent podcast about… Continue ReadingIt Came from Plan B The post It Came from Plan B appeared first on mark a rayner.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Boost Local Shopping Streets by Going Car Free
Berlin wants to support its local businesses by banning cars, and historically this has worked well for other cities. Cities the world over are converting streets built for cars into places that people can enjoy to help their local economies. Berlin joins in on this people-friendly trend and the results
Continue readingThings Are Good: Large Cities are Done with Cars
North Americans love cars and that love is literally killing us, and I don’t mean through car exhaust I mean by directly killing people. Over 60 people were needlessly killed by drivers in Toronto in 2018. This is obviously the fault of careless driving, but it’s also the result of
Continue readingThings Are Good: Talented, Smart People Want to Take Transit
The amount of people who want to drive to work is dropping while the people wanting to take transit is increasing. This is happening despite of 100 years of car-focused urban planing in North America. Companies are finding that if they want to attract smart and talented people then they
Continue readingWritings of J. Todd Ring: Tesla Model 3 vs the Chevy Bolt – And What About the Volt!?
The GM Bolt is a great car – but boring and ugly, and utilitarian, in my view, with surprisingly limited cargo space for a hatchback. The Tesla Model 3 is also a great car, and with surprisingly good cargo space for a mid-size car – and it’s gorgeous. There’s
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Oslo Builds for a Sustainable Transit Future
Oslo: The Journey to Car-free from STREETFILMS on Vimeo. Oslo’s transition from car-focussed to people focussed transportation is well underway and is causing ripples around the world. Other cities are noting how the scandinavian city works with locals to get them out of their cars and onto the streets. Last
Continue readingThings Are Good: This is Systemic Street Safety
The video above demonstrates how communities can transition from an unhealthy, vehicle focused, urban design to a healthy pedestrian design. Regular readers of this site know that streets designed for people are better for communities by making cities healthier and economically more productive. Cars are an clunky way to move
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