01-28-2022, 08:03 PM
(01-28-2022, 05:38 PM)ac3r Wrote: Dude...I know you love bikes but you fail to see the bigger picture most of the time. You can cite all the studies and anecdotes you want but those don't matter to most people. Using your logic, horse and buggy is still viable. And sure, technically it is, but how many people in this century are going to use that? Or dump their car and haul their groceries home from Costco?
Cars have their faults for sure, but they are also extremely useful. Most people enjoy they convenience. They don't care about emissions, gas, maintenance, road congestion etc. They should, but they don't. And that's fair. People are still going to drive and that's their right.
We can promote public transit and alternative transit methods like biking, walking, the bus, the LRT etc and we ought to do so. We need to create a culture where people can accept that such forms of transportation are useful. But people are still going to use and need cars and trucks. It doesn't matter wherever or not they live within walking distance of a bus stop or whatever. Vehicles are convenient and at the end of the day, that's all most people are worried about...not emissions and traffic. You have to create a balance between the two which is what we try to do in urban development. We promote density, transit, alternative methods of transportation while still giving drivers what they need in the form of parking and roads. That's just how it works. You may have some mental idea of a car free utopia but real life necessitates having more than that. Which is why developments still have surface parking. It's just naive and ignorant to think you can just cut all of that out and force everyone onto bikes. Doesn't matter how many studies you want to dig up and link, you're not going to get everyone out of their car and so parking is still required for an endless list of reasons.
A lot of posters on this forum have truly never studied urban development in depth and it shows. Things aren't as black and white as you imagine them to be. Call me objectively wrong all you want if that helps, but I'm really not. My entire career is devoted to researching this stuff. I've written a thesis on alternative transportation, but the truth is people still need and want vehicles and we need the infrastructure to support that.
The reason so many people view living without a car unviable is because we have built cities around the car instead of around people. We build vast tracks of low density housing instead of higher density walkable neighbourhoods. We put the grocery and other stores in areas far from where the housing is and surrounded them with vast parking lots, rather than putting the stores in the neighbourhoods where people live as used to be done before the car ruined cities. There are other cities in the world that are not built this way.