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Building safe, green cities be like
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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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By all means, build the bike lanes. But my point is that it's like going vegan by ordering a salad with your steak. Adding bike lanes won't make cities less car-centric.
Yes it will. How can it ever become anything else than car centric if you can’t get around without a car? People need to go places, and bike lanes get them there without cars.
I’m really trying to understand what’s tripping you up here.
Because having parking isn't what makes it car centric. Having bike lanes doesn't stop it from being car centric. Cities and neighborhoods are designed for cars, and cars will always be the preferred mode of transportation as long as cities and neighborhoods are developed that way. Cities need parking because they are car centric. Cycling, and living in a city with cycling, is a luxury. It's not a bad thing, but it's not going to help, either.
To answer your question, public transit is how you get around without a car. Spend the money on infrastructure, and reserve lanes for busses and light rail. Reclaim roads entirely as pedestrian paths. Force developers and city planners to create walkable communities.
Revisiting the vegan metaphor, everyone agrees that beef production is bad for the environment. If you're running a steakhouse, you've built your entire restaurant around beef. Adding a page of salads to the menu is nice, but it's no less of a steakhouse. They won't sell significantly fewer steaks just because there's a salad on the menu. People will still choose the steak, because it's a steakhouse and that's where people go for that specific thing. To reduce the amount of consumed beef, you have to change the restaurant.
Some cities are car-centric because we designed and subsidised infrastructure to make it so. We induced a demand for cars by spending billions on building, expanding, and maintaining highways to the point that people hop in their car for a 2km trip. People now have no choice of transport other than a car, and that's a problem. It's literally killing us and our children whowith road violence, lung cancer from emissions, and via our climate.
Your steakhouse metaphor is akin to the entire city consisting almost exclusively of steakhouses. But why bother changing it, all cities are designed only for steakhouses. You don't get a choice to eat other cuisines because it's so inconvenient to go across town to the one Greek restaurant.