Houten is pretty small but Groningen, one of the the larger cities in the Netherlands, is now going in this direction. I applaud it. Now it’s just students on bikes that are dangerous. And delivery people on fatbikes or e-scooters.
Also, the size of the city is irrelevant. Even in the video, NJB describes how this concept could be implemented in any city. You don’t encircle the whole city with a ring road, but you create these rings with a diameter of ~2 km around train/metro stations. Even Houten consists of two such rings nowadays. Larger cities would be dozens, if not hundreds, of rings.
You don’t even need rings, Barcalona converted regular blocks into what they call superblocks. Imagine the lines of tic-tac-toe (the inside lines of a 3x3 table) being converted to wide footpaths and bike lanes basically creating miniature ‘autoluwe zones’. Not necessarily by prohibiting cars entirely but making the those streets impractical for through traffic.
Yup, that’s even easier to implement and could be done in any city within a few years. I just can’t fathom why almost every single street in almost every single city MUST support through traffic. Even in cities with great public transport and great infra for walking/cycling, with only a fraction of the citizens driving cars, somehow cars are still allowed to drive through basically everywhere. Looking at you Helsinki…
Houten is pretty small but Groningen, one of the the larger cities in the Netherlands, is now going in this direction. I applaud it. Now it’s just students on bikes that are dangerous. And delivery people on fatbikes or e-scooters.
Also, the size of the city is irrelevant. Even in the video, NJB describes how this concept could be implemented in any city. You don’t encircle the whole city with a ring road, but you create these rings with a diameter of ~2 km around train/metro stations. Even Houten consists of two such rings nowadays. Larger cities would be dozens, if not hundreds, of rings.
You don’t even need rings, Barcalona converted regular blocks into what they call superblocks. Imagine the lines of tic-tac-toe (the inside lines of a 3x3 table) being converted to wide footpaths and bike lanes basically creating miniature ‘autoluwe zones’. Not necessarily by prohibiting cars entirely but making the those streets impractical for through traffic.
Yup, that’s even easier to implement and could be done in any city within a few years. I just can’t fathom why almost every single street in almost every single city MUST support through traffic. Even in cities with great public transport and great infra for walking/cycling, with only a fraction of the citizens driving cars, somehow cars are still allowed to drive through basically everywhere. Looking at you Helsinki…