10-31-2021, 10:43 PM
(10-31-2021, 08:42 PM)danbrotherston Wrote: Car-lite vs. car-free I don't think makes a huge difference, most of our "car-free" places are "car-lite" anyway. Like city parks...they're car free right? I'd call them car-lite, there are service vehicles, drivers who think they should be there for like, weddings or picnics, lost idiots, assholes from time to time. Same with places like the uptown square, the UW campus.
Car-lite might be a spectrum, a place where residents are permitted cars is a lot less car-lite. I wouldn't call the parking lot of a complex car-lite. But clearly there is a grey area.
I am not sure why the 70s experiments didn't work. City Beautiful I think had a video about it with some speculation. I hope that part of it is just the timing. But some of it might also be the context, I think it was often seen as a solution to struggling downtowns, without fixing the real structural issues Even today, if you just close downtown to cars, without making other means of getting there, and without removing free easy parking at the outlying areas, and without having more people living/working downtown, and without giving the few people who do live in a depressed downtown the resources to spend anything, well, it's gonna be a bad result. We have fixed some, but not all of those issues. We have many more people living downtown, downtown is in many ways thriving, it is relatively easy to travel downtown without a car for the vast majority of the population. So I think that is part of it. Whether the result would be different, I have no idea.
Fair enough. Not many places in Waterloo are truly car-free. I can hope that we've fixed the underlying issues with the 70s failures so that we don't see that again today. Looking at other jurisdictions is helpful too. There are a lot of places in Montreal that are very light on cars.