Something which I have been thinking idly about recently is really the problem with a great deal of modern cities which is, mainly, the fact that one has to travel miles and miles to get anywhere. Utilities seem way too far spread apart. Suburban sprawl is rife; streets are always clogged with traffic, and hardly anyone walks anywhere at all. Which is really the problem; people seem forced to use vehicles because there is no other real sensible alternative to getting to the places of importance during the course of one’s day, due to time constraints plus the fact that otherwise one might have to travel 20 or 30 kilometres by foot or bike during the day.
This is a problem. Another problem is that, apart from a few notable exceptions, very few people actually walk anywhere during the day, and modern city design is not terribly conducive to taking a stroll. Older cities were very much built quite differently, and were designed to be walked around. For instance, central London and Paris are much like this, as is Venice.
I suppose there is however a sort of inertia of inevitability about the changes, of course. Cities are larger, much, much larger, than they used to be. They are the centres of commercial and industrial activity on a scale that would have been unheard of even a couple of centuries ago. But the fact that cities now seem to be built around the car and for the car, annoys me. Not because I am too poor to afford a vehicle– but because it seems to me that designing things this way is wasteful and unnecessarily aggravating.
Now, the sort of city I would like to live in- it would be a city where necessary amenities were within walking distance of one’s house, or at least within bike riding distance (this is certainly true if one lives in the CBD). It would be a city with a decent rail network. It would be a city with a bicycle path network independent of the road network. (There are examples where some of this is the case, for instance, in parts of Holland, where bike trails, walking tracks, and roadways are all separate. Furthermore, there is capacity for riding one’s “home bicycle” to the station, locking it up there, catching a train, and unlocking one’s “city bicycle” at the other end. In fact, this is what many Dutch people apparently do- a big difference from having annoying people lugging their bicycles onto trains and taking up unnecessarily large amounts of space.)
This dream city of mine, it would be a city where the use of bikes or public transport was incentivised, and use of vehicles discouraged. Of course, a road network would still be necessary, but, in this fantasy city, it would be far more bare-bones, designed for moving things around that absolutely could not be moved in any other way. It certainly would not be the major transportation network the population used!
The advantages seem obvious to me. One advantage is that one should be able to more efficiently commute to and from work, avoiding rush hour difficulties, for far less infrastructure cost. Another would be the fact that one did not have a massive amount of polluting, noisy traffic. Yet another would be the health benefits to the population, who would be forced to be more active and mobile. This in turn would yield mental health benefits (healthy body, healthy mind, according to the mantra).
The only thing a car should be used for, in my personal opinion, is for travel to locations where there is inadequete public transport infrastructure to or from, eg country locations where the population density is too low to make such networks worthwhile.
