David HoAnything that makes a city a worse place to drive makes it a better place to live… 👀
ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘@davidho Hmm. So nobody remembers traffic jams?
Christopher Schmidt@anne_twain @davidho "remember" them? I experience them regularly. They are a simple fact of geometry in most cities. Cars just take up too much space per person to avoid. (Any city that doesn't have traffic jams... probably isn't a city.)
The thing that makes dealing with traffic jams work best is "not needing to drive". After all, you are the traffic.
Claude@anne_twain most traffic jams are created by people not respecting security distances between vehicles and being selfish instead of demonstrating a basic sense of courtesy on the road. And bad public transport. @davidho
@switch No they're not.
@anne_twain that's what my driving teacher told me years ago so I believed them. Maybe she was wrong. I live in France though. Cities are notably smaller than what counts as even a middlesized one in the USA. And apart from Paris, Marseille, Bordeaux and a few other big towns, we don't have many huge multiple lanes roads.
@switch I guess English is not your first language, then? I'm wondering if your driving teacher said that lack of driver courtesy and driving too close is the cause of traffic *accidents*? A "traffic jam" happens when there's too much traffic on the roads and traffic slows and even stops. What's that called in French?
In America they call it "gridlock", but in Australian English it's a traffic jam.
@anne_twain she was talking about traffic jams in cities. Of course accidents cause traffic jams too.
Cyber Yuki@anne_twain @davidho Plot twist: Traffic jams are caused by traffic. Every time you increase the number of lanes, the number of cars increases because the places you used to walk to now require you to drive to them. This means more parking spots are needed, gas stations have longer lines, and places are more and more difficult to get to. Which means people will have to buy more cars. It's a vicious cycle.
The only way to break this cycle is to make pedestrian friendly cities where everything is 5 to 10 minutes away, either by walking or on bike.
@anne_twain @davidho Sorry, I didn't mean to contradict you. I was just adding to the thread. My apologies for my poor wording.