Cav's Place

I named this as the first part of a series because there’s a lot to say about this issue and I think it likely that I’ll get back to it at some point, not because I have any plans to do so in the very near future. For now, it’s just what I came up with while struggling to look for a topic to write about this week. Interestingly, I thought of this shortly before noticing that a certain event that has something to do with the issue is taking place here just this weekend, so it can be said that the timing is quite appropriate.
Don’t expect links or anything particularly thorough in this post. If I’ll get back to the topic, that may happen, but right now I’ll just be giving a little overview of the issue and a few suggestions, some of which I’m sure I mentioned before as well, as part of discussing other potentially related issues. Seeing as cities have been planned like this for a very long time, the suggestions may sound unusual or even harmful to “normal” people and they will certainly be very difficult to implement under the current circumstances, but when did you ever know me to be interested in what “normal” people think or how things currently stand? Being “normal” is what got us into this mess, after all.

The basic idea is that humans, just like all terrestrial mammals, are usually born with these things called legs, which are actually quite effective in helping them move from one place to another. They cause problems when the distances that have to be covered are great, but reasonably healthy specimens who are not hampered by great burdens or a complete lack of exercise should easily be able to use them to move even several kilometers at a time, which should be enough in itself for cities that have up to several hundred thousand inhabitants and a great help for the bigger ones as well, though a very solid public transport network is absolutely necessary in those.
However, cities are usually built for cars and not for people, so pedestrians usually find themselves at a serious disadvantage. Residential and commercial zones are often entirely separate, many things are concentrated in only a few areas, sidewalks are often the first that get sacrificed when some work needs to be done, plus that they’re usually blocked by parked cars and various other obstacles, and in general the road network, in case it is planned at all, is meant to help motorists, not pedestrians, reach their destination. Not to mention that said motorists often seem to think that they have the right of way simply because a car is much tougher than a person, so the person will move out of their path if they don’t stop, no matter who actually has right of way in that particular situation.

My point of view is that personal vehicles should be meant for people who are sick or old, emergencies and times when a person has truly heavy, bulky or fragile items to carry. At all other times, the choice should simply be between walking and using public transport services, which obviously need to be accessible and very well developed everywhere, for both short and long distances. This would greatly reduce pollution, including noise pollution, the need for fossil fuels and many risks. It should also make for much nicer and calmer cities, where the inhabitants won’t be nearly as stressed as they currently are, in part because such a lifestyle would need to have a much slower pace than the current norm in the developed world.

Some of the measures necessary in order to get to that point are extremely difficult to implement in existing cities, particularly in the big ones, but they should be kept in mind whenever a major project is started, so new cities will be built like this and existing ones will gradually change according to this format as much as possible. I’m talking about splitting cities into many smaller areas, each of which placing the zones and services people need in their daily lives within a reasonable walking distance. Granted that the industrial area would need to remain at the outskirts and certain important administrative buildings, as well as a small number of commercial ones that must be placed in such an area for objective reasons, would most likely still be situated in the city center, but there would be far less traffic to and from these areas and a carefully planned public transport network would handle it without problems.
Yet that’s neither the only thing that can be done nor enough in itself. Projects meant to encourage walking and using the public transport network and discourage driving must be set in motion everywhere. Such projects would use the typical “carrot and stick” approach, on the one hand greatly improving the public transport services and reserving lanes only for these vehicles, clearing and widening sidewalks, giving pedestrians priority over motorists more often and even designating certain areas as off limits for personal vehicles, while on the other virtually ensuring traffic jams for those who insist on driving, adding significant taxes for those who use their cars too often, reducing the number of parking spaces and increasing parking fines.

Any such measures will be met with firm opposition, of course, but so are many others that get implemented anyway. The difference between these and most of said others is that the end result of such a plan would actually be beneficial for both humans and the environment, so those who actually use their brains to think things through have every reason to push such an agenda forward, by any means necessary if need be. Granted that it will be an uphill struggle, seeing as the vast majority of people do not use their brains to think things through and something like this neither lines the pockets nor increases the influence of those in positions of authority, but nothing worthwhile’s ever easy…