The first car-free community built from scratch in the US is starting to take off: 'For some, cars equal freedom, but for me, it's a restriction'
The first car-free community built from scratch in the US is starting to take off: 'For some, cars equal freedom, but for me, it's a restriction'
In the Culdesac part of Tempe, Arizona, residents are the first non-urban community in the U.S. to boast a walkable, car-free neighborhood.
Also a huge number of people in the US travel to places that are walkable:
- Disney World
- Las Vegas (The strip is anyway)
- DC
- NYC
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car free community
cover photo shows both a car and parking lot
I'm just being pedantic but this just shows how ingrained cars are in modern society that even "car-free" communities need them
Also Disney is not designed for public use. It’s built to extract as much money out of you without leaving their property.
The strip is designed for that as well
Vegas’ strip is like 1/10 the size of Disney World and had zero central planning, commercial or civil. The individual properties are designed the way you’re thinking but that’s a footnote by comparison.
Disney world is 40+ square miles of engineered profit-extraction entirely managed by a single proprietor. It’s a very hefty case study in commercial and communal design.
And yet people enjoy it.
Maybe we should build our city centers the same way then.
tree free too apparently
Probably more accurate to say it's a car optional community? Or walkable community? Or even arcology?
Yeah, I agree with you. Being 100% without a car is hard in most cases.
And the answer I see is trains. For the amount of money that does into the car industry (+ multi lane roads, administration, maintenance, etc) we could have super fancy, comfy, fast, frequent, and cheap/free trains.
And people would have more mobility too, at a fraction of the cost and environmental damage.
Robust public transit is the obvious answer to ridding ourselves of the car menace. Now, I need a few hundred billion dollars to "lobby" this into existence.
Trains for long distance + trolleys and subways for local travel. There will invariably be people whose transportation needs require a private vehicle but this combo alone would clear up the majority of cars on the road in my opinion.
Yes, exactly this.
I would love all city roads to look like this (but non-monoculture, have some flowers):
Even in countries with pretty good public transit like the UK and Germany, a large majority of families have a private vehicle. If we had better trains and subways in the US, I don't think too many people would sell their cars, but only use them once or twice a week, rather than once or twice a day.
That's a huge win in my book.
UK and Germany don't have good public transport, maybe except for individual cities. Switzerland on the other hand has good and frequent public transport nationwide.
As an American who has experienced Deutsche Bahn, National Rail, and Amtrak, I'll stand by Germany and the UK having pretty good inter-city rail compared to us. Lübeck and Bath are the cities there I've been with the worst public transit, and they would be well above average in the US.
I haven't been to Switzerland yet, but it's not shocking to hear the public transit there is all-around better.
The trains in Japans greater Tokyo area were amazing when I went to visit. 99 percent of the time they took like 3 or 4 minites more than taking a car and I didn't need tk worry about parking or driving.
If it's the place I think it is then it's also located directly off the highway without really any nearby restaurants.
UPS ain't walkin
Bicycles with trailers? Could work for a lot of packages I order anyways.