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  • Car free rhetoric like this is often as not nonsensical and ablist. It's one thing to want to reduce traffic and give people options other than driving. That's great. But what a lot of people seem to mean by "car free" is less accessibility for locals and people with disabilities.

    For example, I live in a college town. Our public transit is abysmal and we don't have anything like a subway system. We have buses that will bring you to the mall or to other cities and towns in the area, but they don't run frequently enough to be a replacement for personal vehicles. Parking, for people who actually live and work in the area, is an absolute pain in the ass because we get a lot of tourism and people from neighboring areas flock here for our restaurants and shops.

    For a while now there's been talk about eliminating on street parking downtown. There has been no suggestion about adding parking anywhere to make up for this or restricting any of the existing parking to be resident-only. So if you live downtown? I guess you'll just have to walk across town to get home, or even drive around in circles until the shops close and people drive their cars back to the suburbs.

    It's already rough parking close to home if you live on main street, and much of the existing parking requires walking uphill. We have a single parking garage, which typically gets full when we have a snow storm because the entire town is expected to park there or get towed unless they have a driveway.

    This won't have much impact on the upper middle class home owners who are largely the ones pushing for it. It will definitely have an impact on the working class people paying out the nose to live in the available rentals downtown in a place where so many of what might have been affordable apartments a decade ago are now airbnbs.

    Increased walkability is great when it's well thought out. But when it's not? It's literally just a form of gentrification that lets those who push for it feel superior to the working class people who pay the price for it in commutes, physical labor, and reduced access.

  • As someone who's been living in Tokyo for the better part of a decade, it's not a car free city by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps they mean most people don't own cars? Not sure.

    That said, I've never owned nor driven a car in Japan and probably only use taxis about once or twice a year at most. Trains all dayyy! 🚃💨

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