11-01-2015, 02:11 PM
(11-01-2015, 09:49 AM)eizenstriet Wrote: I watched those trains travel around Besançon for 6 minutes, and I conclude that the French have a lot to learn from us.
Everywhere they went, the trains were passing through mid-rise development. No highrises at all! How will they ever make the transit pay for itself?
And don’t get me started on those stodgy buildings. Pretty well the same old thing, kilometer after kilometer. They should pick the best five, say, of those and keep them. The rest – gone, so that a progressive city can be created, free from the fusty past. Then they might have an interesting liveable city which others might want to move to. Also, they might then actually attract some tourists!
We could learn some things from places like Besançon. Like how to construct dense urban buildings with zero parking, and not care about NIMBYs concerned with spillover parking. Like how not to consider single-family detached houses to be a viable building style right next to the central part of the city.
It goes both ways, eizenstriet. Building medium-density buildings, and doing so in a broad area, requires the kind of community buy-in that the neighbourhoods adjacent to the downtowns would make extremely hard to obtain.
Perhaps we'll see you at council advocating for less parking and less setback in new developments, so that smaller-scale development can be viable here.