Not Just Bikes
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2022–2024
14:18 · 1.1M views · Apr 4, 2022
Not Just Bikes visits the Toronto Islands, home to Canada's only car-free neighbourhood. He explains the waiting list and strict ownership rules and asks why more such places aren't built.
Used as a concrete example of what a car-free neighbourhood looks like and of the demand for them.
3 comments from Hacker News
> I’m not convinced that will ever change unless sprawl becomes unimaginably expensive. Right, but that's the core of my point: It is unimaginably expensive, it's just getting subsidized to ridiculous extents. (For the readers unaware of this: [LINK] ) And saying the "vast majority" prefer it is wrong. They prefer it over the alternatives they have within the United States , not over the alternative possibilities . I'm absolutely not dismissing that some people prefer the suburbian lifestyle over EU-style walkable cities, but saying the majority of Americans do when so few even know what's possible is misplaced in the best possible read of it. The demand for car-free neighbourhoods is also obvious if you look at what exists, and how exorbitant the prices are due to the high demand and low offer. Another example: this video This song-and-dance of "Everyone likes suburbia because everyone wants to move there, it's illegal to build anything else because it would then be something else than suburbia, nobody wants the alternative anyway because it's too expensive, it's too expensive because it's in high demand, and it's in high demand because it's illegal to build something else" is like the definition of catch-22.
You're comparing living in a car dependant city vs living in car dependant suburbs. It's not going to be meaningfully different. You mention the constant noise, but what do you think causes it? To see what everyone means by car dependency, you'd need to see the few places that aren't. Here's what a 100% car-free island looks like: this video Here are some progressive European cities that have started to undo the damage that's been done by cars: • Freiburg, Germany: [LINK] • Haarlem, Netherlands: [LINK] • Paris, France: [LINK] Check out these background noise levels: • A very busy mixed-use street in Amsterdam: [LINK] • Exiting the train station in Delft, Netherlands: [LINK] • Cycling streets in the Netherlands: [LINK] . You can even hear birds chirping at 4:29.
> Cities are welcome to erect whatever barriers they like to private cars. this video "The real problem is that we couldn’t build another place like this if we wanted to. It’s not allowed. It’s literally illegal in Canada, to build something like this today."