Most road widenings happened with 0 public input.
Trucks just showed up in the middle of the night and bulldozed sidewalks to add a few traffic lanes because traffic engineers said so.
Now, when we want those lanes converted back to sidewalks or bike lanes, it requires:
- 15 public meetings
- an army of lawyers,
- coordination between 5 different city agencies
- special one-on-one meetings with local stakeholders
I love living in a modern city. The sidewalks are mostly very wide with narrow roads. There’s room for people and people scale walking around.
For some reason, there’s also tons of small local businesses on most streets… Because we can walk there, and driving isn’t really much faster than transit in much of the city, so it’s easy to go outside and get what you need.
We’re still fighting to narrow many roads, add in more bike infrastructure, and generally slow down cars more so it gets safer (and less polluted), but it’s way way better then the stroadville I lived in in the US.
(and less polluted)
Speed limits have a noticeable impact on pollution? That makes sense in a way, it’s generally less efficient to go faster from my understanding, so if speed goes up, mpg goes down, and total gas burnt and therefore pollution output goes up. I’ve just never heard it outright stated, and now I’m wondering how much of a difference it makes on a per mile driven basis. Do you happen to have any data on the topic?
I will have to do some digging in it, but it’s shown in the clean air plans in Germany, UK, and France. If a city has too huge of a vehicle pollution rate in the air, it is required to drop the speed limits as to improve air quality.
Berlin is actually (because conservatives don’t care to understand emissions and are happily being jerks) moving the speed limits back up now that air quality has improved from dropping the speed limits a while back: https://www.berlin.de/en/news/9874906-5559700-clean-air-and-noise-action-plan-abolitio.en.html
There’s lots of research and articles on it, including plenty of notes cutting off the usual arguments by the uninformed. Capping speeds on city streets around 20-25mph (about 30kph) is a huge win for health, environmental impacts, safety, and noise pollution:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-026-00100-3
https://healthyairtech.com/news/is-our-speed-causing-air-pollution/
Charitably, with the image in context, it’s mired in bureaucracy because it used to not be.
Reality: local government is still captured by cars.
