What about like buses and stuff? I agree, cars are quite wasteful in urban areas. But public transportation infrastructure would have to change for this to be realizable. Capacity and reliability would need to be increased along with service area. The extent depends largely on which urban area we are talking about.

I am the Greater Toronto Area. Our public transportation is mediocre at best.

for. motor-vehicle free would be complicated considering public transport and delivery to stores is done by motor vehicle, but obviously a huge reduction can be made. I think large tolls and expensive permits like in London and some other European cities are a good start. Large sections of the center of Madrid where I live are closed to through-traffic. I've been living without a car here for 10 years now without any problem and I love it. If I had a car, I'd only use it to go somewhere outside the city on the weekends.

Let's create a diplomacy city

Lando, the TTC is actually a pretty good public transport system. Where else have you lived that has better public transit? I'm currently in Montreal and have lived all over Canada and I can only wish they all had transit systems like Toronto does. I *still* don't even have my G1, and I've always been a frequent user of public transit, but not out of any environmental sensibilities.

I used the TTC quite regularly when I was growing up. I don't live in Toronto anymore, but in Waterloo (the GRT is actually not bad but its just buses). I always thought the TTC was fine but they can improve in a lot of ways. I am also biased because I spent the summer in Japan and their train system is close to perfect.

The TTC is, first of all, overpriced. It costs 3 dollars to go one stop. It also costs 3 dollars to ride the length of the thing from Kipling to Kennedy. I don't think this makes sense.

Secondly, their union is really holding them back. The salaries they have to pay their ticket collectors is out of this world huge. It doesn't make sense and a business can't run in this way. They also can never figure out the collective bargaining so strikes happen all the time.

Thirdly, it hardly covers all of Toronto. There are what I would call 2.5 lines that barely reach all over the city. And the buses aren't that great either since they don't get their own lanes and have to deal with traffic like all the cars. And their schedules are fairly irregular. Although the Blue Line late-night buses are great.

It would also be nice if GO Transit and the TTC could work some sort of alliance out, so people don't have to use two providers for one commute (this is something that Japan is actually worse at w.r.t. their train system).

I didn't mean to say it was bad, just that it was average. I am not familiar with the Montreal subway but I have rode it a couple times. I found Calgary's system to be fairly good when I was there.

I can agree with you that their union is out of control. It pains me to hear their hourly wage when they could quite easily be replaced with automated machines. The Blue night busses are my favourite, they're so good. If Montreal had night busses like Toronto I'd probably wander drunkenly out of the downtown core more. Montreal's "subway" is more like a system of busses in tunnels, I mean seriously, they're not on rails, they have wheels!

I worked in Calgary for a couple of months and their light rail system is decent enough. The bus routes I had to use seemed needlessly convoluted, but it could have just been the area I was in.

I'm not sure if the TTC is overpriced because most transit systems seem to charge 2.75 per adult. I know the employees are overpaid, but the system still runs at a loss. It's still a lot cheaper than a cab. Even renting Bixi bikes costs like $5 for half an hour.

Yes I agree its cheaper than anything else. What I would suggest for them is a price based on how far you travel. So a short distance can be less than $3 while a trip from one end of the city to the other can be more. They could probably find a way to implement this in a way that total revenues would be unchanged. This is fairly common practice for this industry.

Also, about a year ago they ran out of tokens. They could probably save money by implementing re-usable passes. You stick your card into a machine and put some money on it and use this card to pay your fares.

I'm all for increased reliability in public transit. I don't drive, nor do I ever plan to, mostly out of intimidation at the idea of driving, and a stubbornness to keep it that way. So a car-free city would be a lovely idea. As far as public transit goes, I always prefer trains and subways over buses.

For me, bicycling is the most effective (and it's utterly reliable!) mode of tranportation in the city. In Chicago, I can almost always beat public tranportation. And it's 50/50 to beat a car. Biking, even without parking tickets and meters, etc saves the city a huge amount of money on road mantinance, and frees up a whole bunch of space that was used for parking. It keeps your population fit, and collecting social security for longer. Buisnesses don't have to expend large budegts to try and accomodate people coming in and leaving their 17 foot long object outside the store!

Of course, you need a solid public transit system in place for winter (for the chill prone, winter biking is surprisingly easy) and for people who can't bike, but that's not the only option for producing a car free city. I think it's important to lobby for streets or trails through a city that are for bicycle use only, it makes the expeirence way safer (dooring is a thing of the past) and that would really promote it as a mode of transportation.

US midwest cities with urban sprawl (aka suburbia) would make this a nightmare. Look at Cincinnati. Currently our public transit consist of two bus systems. No subways or trolleys or anything. One bussystem (Metro) covers most of the primary county (but little of the suburbs in Ohio) and has express routes that run about once an hour and stop around 6 PM and the other is almost all oriented around express routes in Northern Kentucky, also stopping by 6 PM. If you get caught late or have an emergency and need to go home early, you can be seriously screwed as the expresses run from 7-9a and 4-6p. Outside those times, you can't get home to the suburbs. Inside those times, you have 3 or 4 of your bus running in the morning and 3 or 4 in the evening. That's about it. The non-express routes are almost exclusively inner city areas/first of the suburbs now urban areas and you wouldn't want to live there or park you car there for any length of time. Plus, the routes take so long that betting back to your car may take an hour.

Seriously, unless you provide good transportation with more routes, greater frequency of runs, and expand the times so they include early morning (like 5 or 6a) to late at night (11p ot 1a), you will never see it happen. And it isn't financially feasible to make those changes to the bus systems as they are cutting routes now because of the cost of diesel fuel.

@ gramilaj, I'd love to bike but I have to move around the city a lot and I can't arrive sweaty. And how healthy can it be to do exercise with your mouth around a tailpipe? that would certainly improve in a car-less city though.

@ Draug i feel your pain, the US is probably the worst offender in terms of urban planning. You can probably thank Detroit for that, and I don't mean their city planners. Still, it's going to happen because it has to happen. Better to think of ways to make it work and get involved.

"Still, it's going to happen because it has to happen."

Would you care to elaborate? Why does it have to happen? I don't see why cities need to move away from cars and toward public transportation. Or even why they cannot co-exist.

roflmao

maybe in places whose infrastructure and forward planning... y'know... exists

but not anywhere near where I live, we're on the verge of cutting the only public transportation system in the city for budget reasons

@Draug, the development of public transport in canada as compared to the US is an example of the cultural/political differences, i think.

Compared with Ireland, America is huge, to get anywhere you need to drive, cycling is often not an option. This is a result of geography. When you had miles and miles of open country side to expand into there was no need to concentrate in a small area.

I don't know if the political will exists at city/state level in the US to change people's behaviour. Many peopel like to drive and would oppose tasx increases to fund public transport - taking away their freedom to drive where+when ever they want.

Problems with bannign delivery vans and buses (i did say all motor vechiles) would be extreme, bikes and public transport could replace cars. (within a urban center - you could start at the center and work your way out.)

Many bussinesses rely upon employees who commute long drives into the urban center, while it would be great to decentralise, announcing a blanket ban on personal cars within a 6 month time-frame would give these bussinesses more than enough time to implement private transport solutions - that is hiring a bus or multiple buses to ferry their employees in on a daily basis. (that multiple bussinesses could co-operate to arrange specific buses where they need them would occur to most bussiness people)

That is a fairly simple solution for commuters - also it doesn't require a cent of tax payers money.

@Draug - i am making some asusmptions about 'free market' managing to implement a new transport system without needing to resort to big government. However as you point out bus systems are cutting routes now because of the fuel cost.

Well obviously if demand is low and you cna't make money from a route you will cnacel it. On the other hand is fuel prices are getting higher then personal transport (cars) must also be getting more expensive. Which is cutting directly into people's earnings. That's basically the equivalent of forcing the public to pay (well the car driving public)

i'd love to see companies recommending their employees live near a bus route, and unions deciding to open up a new area for employees to live by negotiating with te bus company to open up a route... but then i like crazy messed up things which you might think couldn't possibly happen.

I bike as it happens. I see my bike as independance to go wherever i like, and i would not want to give that up. So i can see this multiplied for a car. Though there would be nothing stopping people from using their car to go on intercity routes...

I interned at EMC and they were wicked into this. They really encouraged people biking to work and carpooling. They help coordinate it and gave people perks for carpooling. They also ran shuttles between all the different buildings (some of which are a couple towns away) so that when there were big meetings, everyone didn't have to drive their own car.

Cities should be re-distributed so that must people can live in max. of 15 kilometers from their work or school. (megacities shouldn't exist at all), that way must people could travel with bike or specially designed vehicles, letting public transport mainly for ancient, pregnant or disabled people. Add a pair of surrounding rapid ways for those days you wanna travel from one extreme to the other of the city, complemented with an eficient subway sistem, and a suburban rapid train to connect strategic points in broader aereas.

thinkin again, I should have given a maximum of 10 km.

@ Tom, read "has to happen" as a moral imperative rather than a practical one. Of course the phrasing is an exaggeration, we humans are free to ignore all evidence and even accelerate our march to making the planet uninhabitable. some would describe such behavior as self-destructive, but we are free to do it nonetheless. Likewise we are free to ignore the fact that by buying so much oil, we are funding the terrorists and extremists that serve as the justification for our multiple wars in far away places. There are other more practical arguments as well, like the fact that a 10 minute commute by bicycle or bus is a vast improvement in quality of life over an hour of stress-filled traffic in the choked urban arteries. Taking steps to reduce personal motor vehicle traffic (increase tax on gas, introduce tolls and require permits for circulation and parking in urban areas, car-ownership tax, reinvesting proceeds to make public transport more efficient, comfortable and accessible by price and location...)is a win for everyone.
@orathaic: you are such an idealist. Bravo! I don't know about a sudden and radical break from motor-vehicle traffic, but there are practical ways to make a transition gradually and keep motor-free the goal toward which we should always strive.

Maybe it's obvious, but another consideration is the distribution of retailers/outlets. In the US, the dominant model is to have a few massive stores around the peripheral of a city rather than many more distributed shops that people can access easily walking. In Madrid, I go shopping once a week for a family of three. I walk to the market with a couple hand-carts and walk back. We have markets in each neighborhood with stalls where smaller sellers can sell specialty and local foods, fresh fish, butchers, fresh fruit and veg of very high quality. These markets I believe are run by the city but paid for in rent to the sellers. Additionally, there are small groceries well distributed.

This thread brings New York City in mind to me. This is a well planned city (besides lower manhattan) with - not a great - but a decent public transport system. There are commuter lines running into the city from long island, yonkers, and new jersey, there is an extensive subway system and bus system, major expressways running vertically and horizontally across the city, multiple tunnels and bridges in and out, trucks and large vehicles have restricted access to parts of the city, Times Square was just made an pedestrian are, and that is going to expand shortly. All of this - the best attempts we can give - and you still have to wait at least a half an hour to cross the GW bridge. You simply can't convince people to give up their cars. Plus, not many people would want to bike from Yonkers, through the Bronx, to Manhattan on a daily basis, so bikes are of limited use for commuters living outside the boroughs.

and Mexico City to me: a real chaos that nobody knows how on earth can still work

@goldfinger, you have to hit their wallets harder if you want to change their behaviors and preconceived notions. then quickly invest the proceeds into improving the public transport system.

Of course, there is also a lot of through-traffic crossing the GW bridge that has nothing to do with city traffic. The circulation of through-traffic around NYC going up to Boston could definitely be improved as well.

Yeah mcbry, I agree. The New York City subway system isn't exactly top of the line. Then again, it sure as hell beats the Metro here in DC. Can hardly get anywhere on these trains. Boston has the best US subway system I've seen.

Yes, petrol (or gas as you call it in the US) has a big tax in most European countries.

This is to encourage users to reduce consumption (so less need be imported) and has resulted in a demand for smaller cars which are more fuel efficient.

A completely different car culture to what you see in America. Though the geography means thign are often further away in the US, i think this publlic/national security policy has had a greater effect.

If your goal is to reduce carbon emissions and cut our dependency on fossil fuels, then we should look to alternative means of powering our personal vehicles, such as electric, e85, biodiesel, and hybrid. The best solution would be a biodiesel hybrid or an e85 hybrid. Let the electric motor do the driving and the small e85/biodiesel recharge the battery and provide oomph when needed. Also, recollecting energy in the form of heat when braking and feeding that back into the system would reduce fuel use on a hybrid around town.

to be honest, I'm not up on the relative impact of each tech option. I'd read that diesel produced large quantities of soot that created respiratory problems, but that biodiesel was somewhat cleaner. If I were to buy a car I'd have to do some serious research beforehand. What bothers me about this is the idea that all the cars currently on the road have to be cashed in. The manufacturing process of building a new car isn't exactly clean either, so I wonder what is the real cost/benefit of getting rid of a normal car you already have that is still in working order to exchange it for one of the technologies you mentioned. I am a little suspicious about government programs which punish you for maintaining older cars in good working order.
Of course you're right that removing cars from the cities is not just about emissions and fossil fuels. It's also about reducing traffic, noise and stress.

You should visit Venice.

@ebay: why?

@draug: growing crops to turn into biodiesel takes land away from food use.

If you have access to a decent transport system it can (but not neccesarily does) recude energy use per person. (the not neccesarily is because having a bus route which runs, whether there is demand for it or not, can mean greater fuel consumption...)

Of course the ideal solution is one which cuts down on emissions while giving each person their own individual independant transport vechile. Cars however take up more space, weigh more (hence higher energy cost to produce and run) and kill more people than the equivalent hybrid/electric bike - though i favour a lighter bike without a motor... the human body can do the work and food grown in the place of bio-fuel-crops can feed the human body...